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Tam o' Shanter's Kirk 





THE 


LAND 


OF HEATHER 




WRITTEN AND 
ILLUSTRATED BY 

CLIFTON JOHNSON 



Published by THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

New York MCMIV 

LONDON : MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED 



Copyright, igoj, 

by The Macmillan Company 






ACKNOWLEDGMENT 

is hereby made to The 
Outlook, The Interior, 
Good Housekeeping, The 
Congregationalist, The 
Pilgrim, The Era, The 
Household-Ledger, and The 
Springfield Republican, in 
which periodicals several of 
the chapters included in this 
volume were £rst published. 



Reprinted 
December, igoj 



TRANBPHR 
^ Ot PUBLIC LIBBABY 
B£1PT. lO. 1940 



Contents 



Chapter 












I. 


A Rural Hamlet 


II. 


Village Happenings 










III. 


The Ways of the Farm Folk 










IV. 


An Excursion 










V. 


Historic Ground . 










VI. 


Thrums . . • 










VII. 


A Highland Glen 










VIII. 


Lochs and Bens . 










IX. 


The Isle of Mull 










X. 


The Crofters of Skye . 










XI. 


A Country School 










XII. 


The Sabbath and the Kirks , 








XIII. 


A Burns Pilgrimage 








XIV. 


A Glimpse of Galloway 


, 









\ ^.-^•■r^;;«^.•.- 




A Chat on the Highway 



List of Illustrations 



Tarn o' Shanter's Kirk . 

A Chat on the Highway . 

Setting up Blocks of Peat to Dry 

His Favorite Grandchild . 

Threshold Gossip . 

A Favorite Loitering Place 

On the Moorland . 

A Schoolroom Corner in Drumtochty College 

Kathie scrubs the Front Walk 

**A Wall of Crockery'' . 

Village Bairns 

Logie Ruin . 

Conducting her Coo to Pasture 

vii 



Frontispiece 



facing 



Vlll 



List of Illustrations 



Wash 



Cuddling for Trout 

A Village Well 

Washing by the Burnside . 

The Laddies playing <* Links 

Quoits — a Dispute 

Gypsies 

Spreading Blankets after the 

A Servant Lassie 

Neighbors 

Women Workers . 

An Upland Pasture 

Haymaking . 

Feeding the Pet Lamb 

A Hayrake . 

Carrying Peat out of the Bog 

Visiting 

By the Fireside 

A Meeting in the Lane . 

''Puttin' oot the Dung" 

Entrance to a Close 

Edinburgh 

Melrose Abbey 

Queen Mary's Prison on an Isle 

Palaulays 

In the Tenements . 

Spinning a ** Peerie " 



in the 



Schoolyard 



of Lochleven 



facing 



facing 



facing 



facing 



facing 



List of Illustrations 



The Window in Thrums House 

Returning from Market . 

The Peat-stack in the Yard 

Stirring up the Fire . 

'*A Tattie D00I7'* 

Ruins of a Cotter's Home 

Water from the Well 

A Mountain Stream 

Loch Katrine and Ben Venue 

A Coach to Lomond 

Highland Pipers 

Kilchurn Castle on Loch Awe 

Loch Lomond and Ben Lomond 

A Cottager piling Peat 

Churning 

A Kitchen Corner . 

An Old Farmhouse 

A Fire on the Floor 

Skye Fishing-boats . 

Feeding the Dog 

A Rider 

Resting on a Dyke . 

A Highland Cow . 

A Bird's-nest in the Hedge 

The School at Work 

**A Wee Brig ower a Burnie " 





135 




136 


facing 


140 


tt 


H5 


(f 


H7 


. 


148 


• 


149 


facing 


151 


*( 


154 


t( 


158 


(€ 


160 


tt 


163 


. 


171 


• 


172 


facing 


174 


tt 


181 


. 


185 


. 


186 


facing 


188 


ft 


195 


tt 


200 


tt 


206 



facing 2 1 6 



List of Illustrations 



A Garden Rose 

An Exchange of SnufF 

Sunday Afternoon . 

A Church in a Northern Glen 

A Mess for the Pigs 

Birthplace of Robert Burns 

The Brig o' Doon . 

**The Twa Brigs o' Ayr" 

A Stone-breaker 

The Postman 

Woodland Hyacinths 

The Wall of Severus 

A Castle of the Black Douglas 









Page 








222 








facing 231 








234 








. . 236 








'• 237 








facing 241 








243 








. 245 








246 








facing 248 








254 








256 








. . 258 




Setting up Blocks of Peat to Dry 



Introductory Note 

Heather is not peculiarly Scotch. It grows on 
the moors and waste lands of all parts of Britain and 
is found in most sections of the continent of Europe. 
But in Scotland it is omnipresent to an unusual de- 
gree, and, besides, it has become so closely associated 
in literature, both of fact arid of fiction, with this 
particular country as to have acquired many synony- 
mous attributes. The flowers are of a lilac-rose color, 
but vary much in depth of tint, thus adding materially 
to the beauty of the wilds which they delight to in- 
habit. The heather is in its glory in late August and 
early September, and one who sees it then would be 
apt to forget that it had any other mission than to 
delight the eye ; yet it is not without its utilitarian 
aspect as well. The domestic bees find their richest 
feast of the year in its blossoms ; the plants contribute 
much to the formation of peat ; the shrubby growth 
makes admirable cover for the game birds, and is 
often used for thatching cottages, or is tied to handles 
for brooms and in bunches for scrubbing brushes ; 
and still other uses might be mentioned. 



xii Introductory Note 

Naturally one would expect the heather to be the 
Scotch national flower, and perhaps it might have 
been had not a chance incident conferred the distinc- 
tion on the thistle. History says this choice was due 
to James III, who took the thistle to illustrate his 
royal motto, "In Defence*'; but according to tradi- 
tion the preference given the thistle dates back to 
the time when the Norsemen ravaged all the shores 
of northern Europe. On one occasion, in the dead 
of night, an invading Norse force approached unper- 
ceived the camp of the Scots who had gathered to 
oppose them. But while the Norsemen paused to 
ascertain the undefended points of the camp they pro- 
posed to assault, one of their spies stepped on a 
thistle, and the sudden pain brought forth a violent 
oath. This aroused the Scots, and they hastened to 
attack the invaders, gained a complete victory, and 
afterward adopted the plant which had been the 
means of delivery as their emblem. The thistle's 
thorny vigor perhaps very well expressed the Scotch 
character in those long-gone fighting days, but now 
the hardiness and warm bloom of the heather, to my 
mind, indicate more exactly the racial individuality. 

CLIFTON JOHNSON. 



THE LAND OF HEATHER 



The Land of Heather 



A RURAL HAMLET 



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His Favorite Grandchild 



IN southern 
England the 
hawthorn 
hedges had shed 
their petals and 
taken on their 
summer greenness ; 
but when I con- 
tinued northward 
and crossed the 
vague boundary 
line which sepa- 
rates the two an- 
cient kingdoms of 
the island, the 
hawthorn was in 
full bloom. This 
was reassuring, for 
I had been half 



2 The Land of Heather 

afraid I was too late to see the Scotch spring at its 
best ; and the unexpectedness of the transition made 
these northern hedgerows, with their white flower-clus- 
ters and their dehcate emerald leafage, seem doubly- 
beautiful. 

That I might lose nothing of Nature's charm in its 
early unfoldings of buds and greenery, I did not pause 
in any of the large towns, but kept on until I reached 
the secluded hamlet of Drumtochty, among the hills a 
few miles beyond Perth. There I made my home for 
several weeks in the cottage of the village shoemaker. 

A wide-spreading farm and grazing district lay round 
about, and the Highlands were not far distant. Indeed, 
their outlying bulwarks were always in sight, rising in 
blue ridges that cut ragged lines into the sky along 
the north. Drumtochty, or " the clachan," as it was 
familiarly called by the natives, was the central vil- 
lage of the region. It was situated on a long slope, 
or "strath," that swept gently downward to where a 
sudden declivity marked the verge of a winding, half- 
wooded ravine, in the depths of which flowed a small 
river. 

Aside from the clachan on the strath, habitations 
were much scattered. They consisted mostly of neigh- 
borless farmhouses, and a few lonely shepherds' cot- 
tages on the borders of the moors. In the midst of 
an imposing grove a mile or two from the village 



A Rural Hamlet 3 

stood the big decayed mansion of Logie House, 
reminiscent of days not very remote, when the district 
had its own local lairds ; but at present resident gentry 
were entirely lacking. There was, however, a shooting- 
lodge, at the head of a wild ravine up toward the hills, 
to which the aristocracy resorted in the season ; and I 
ought to mention Trinity College, on a high terrace, in 
plain sight from the clachan, just over the river, its 
brown walls and pinnacles rising above its environing 
trees, like some ancient castle. The college clock could 
be plainly heard when it tolled the hours, and the col- 
lege bells made pleasant music chiming for evening 
service. But it was only by sight and sound that 
Trinity College had any connection with the life of the 
people who dwelt in its vicinity ; for while they were 
strenuous Presbyterians, the school was strictly Epis- 
copal, and the pupils all came from a distance. 

The low stone houses of the clachan were built in 
two parallel lines. One row fronted on the east and 
west highway. The other was behind the first, up the hill 
a few rods. The homes on the foremost row were just 
enough removed from the road to give space before each 
for a narrow plot of earth that the householders dug 
over with every return of spring and set out to flowers. 
Rose bushes in abundance clambered up about the win- 
dows and doorways, and several of the cottages had a 
pair of ornamental yew trees so trimmed and trained 



4 The Land of Heather 

as to arch the gate in the stone wall or picket fence 
which separated the flower-plots from the street. The 
people took great pride in their dooryard plants, and 
in all such adjuncts of the house-fronts as were con- 
stantly in the eyes of the critical public. The flowers 
were more especially the care of the women, but it was 
not uncommon to find the children and the men work- 
ing among them ; and there was " Auld Robbie Robert- 
son," now over eighty and living all alone, who kept 
the flower-beds that bordered his front walk as tidy 
as anybody. I stopped to speak with Auld Robbie 
one day while he was in his garden, pulling some 
grass out of a bunch of columbines — "Auld ladies* 
mutches " (caps), he called them. He was glad to tell 
me about his plants and blossoms, and when I started 
to go he picked a rose and presented it to me, first 
carefully removing all the leaves from the stem, that 
its beauty might be the more apparent. 

The houses on the back row of the clachan were 
but Httle exposed to public view, and the approaches 
to them were often carelessly unkempt. The neat 
paths and flower-beds characteristic of the fronts of the 
more prominent row were here lacking. Grime and 
disorder had their own way. Perhaps this was because 
these houses had no back doors ; for their rear Walls 
bordered a httle lane and were wholly blank, save for 
now and then a diminutive window. Some place for 



A Rural Hamlet 5 

tubs, old rags, and rubbish was a necessity, and as the 
front door was the only entrance, odds and ends 
naturally gathered there. 

Between the two rows of houses the land was 
checkered with little square gardens, and I found these 
at the time of my arrival crowded full of green, newly 
started vegetables. In some convenient nook of the 
gardens, next the hedges that enclosed them, was often 
a hive or two of bees. It was swarming-time, and 
almost any warm midday an incipient migration was 
liable to be discovered. Immediately arose a great 
commotion of noise and shoutings intended to dis- 
tract the bees ; and there was an excited running hither 
and thither to borrow a hive and get a certain ancient 
of the village, who was a bee expert, to help settle 
the swarm in its new home. 

This bee expert, who was commonly spoken of as 
" The Auld Lad," comes hobbling into the garden 
where the bees, supposedly by virtue of the racket 
made, have delayed their flight and suspended them- 
selves in a brown branch on a gooseberry bush or 
some other garden shrub. All the women and chil- 
dren of the vicinity gather at a safe distance and look 
on while the Auld Lad with apparent unconcern sets 
some stools covered with white cloths near the swarm. 
Then he puts the hive on the cloths and brushes the 
bees into it as if they were so much chaflT. His face 



6 The Land of Heather 

IS unprotected and his hands bare, and the crowd re- 
gard him as a sort of wizard in his deaHngs with the 
hot-handed insects ; but he says it is nothing — bees 
do not care to sting at such a time. 

Drumtochty had two shops. Each occupied one 
room in the owner's dwelHng. The post-office was in 
the larger shop, but about all that was needful for 
official purposes was a desk, as the mail was de- 
livered at the houses twice a day. Any community 
in Britain that receives an average of fifty letters a 
week is entitled to free delivery, and the people of the 
Drumtochty district were not so few or seclusive but 
that they did much more postal business than this 
minimum. The chief daily mail arrived at twelve, 
when a stout, heavy-shoed man in uniform would 
come tramping in from the west with a brown bag 
strapped over his shoulder and a cane in his hand. 
He enters the post-office and the mail is emptied from 
his bag and sorted on the little counter. The post- 
master and all his family join in this task, and it is 
soon finished, and " Posty " with a new load goes 
trudging in his steady swing down the road. At the 
same time the postmaster's daughter shoulders a 
smaller bag, dons her straw hat, and starts out to dis- 
tribute the mail through the clachan and for a mile 
and a half west among the farmers. 

The sign over the door of the second of the village 




A Favorite Loitering Place 



A Rural Hamlet 7 

shops read thus : " R. Wallace, General Grocer, li- 
censed to sell tea, tobacco, and snuff." The room in 
which these articles, together with " sweeties" and other 
small wares, were sold was tiny and much crowded. 
Near the door was a little counter with a pair of scales 
on it, and behind this counter presided Mrs. Wallace, 
the proprietor of the shop. She was a short, uneasy- 
looking body with a sharp tongue, and a long story of 
trials and wrongs and complaints which she retailed 
with the goods from her shelves to every customer. 
She had a remarkable propensity for keeping in hostili- 
ties with her neighbors, but always felt herself to be 
the innocent and injured party ; and to any person who 
would listen she discoursed endlessly on others* black- 
ness and her own immaculateness. In fact, these wordy 
outpourings made it so difficult for a customer to get 
away that many of the villagers avoided her shop 
altogether. 

Until within a few years she and her husband had 
kept the village inn. They were turned out, accord- 
ing to her story, through a very wicked series of plot- 
tings, deceptions, and broken promises. Her husband's 
brothers were the chief villains in the affair, and it was 
understood that she lay awake nights hating them. 
The two dissenting ministers of the village were also 
objects of her antipathy. Both in preaching and in 
practice they were opposed to the use of spirits as a 



8 The Land of Heather 

beverage, and the things they had said about those 
who sold intoxicants were not at all to the liking of 
the lady of the shop. " They're a'ways meddlin'," she 
declared in tones full of venom, " and they'll preclaim 
frae the poopit aboot the weekedness o' the pubhc (the 
grog shop) ; but I say, dinna they ken that in the 
Bible the publicans are aye ca'ed much better than 
the sinners ? " 

The public house of the clachan was on the back 
row. At noon, in the evening, and on holidays, there 
were many loiterers in its neighborhood, and the sound 
of boisterous laughing or singing was often heard from 
the taproom. Occasionally the merriment was increased 
and encouraged by the drone of a bagpipe. The inn 
stood near a narrow byway which connected the front 
row of the village with the back, and down this by- 
way, drunken men frequently came staggering after too 
freely partaking of the wares of the publican. Some- 
times a man would be so overcome when he reached 
the main road that he would throw himself down on 
the grass that bordered the wheel tracks and lie there for 
hours in tipsy stupor, while the rest of us who travelled 
that way passed by on the other side like the priest 
and Levite of old. These inert figures were most often 
stretched on the turf near the outskirts of the clachan, 
with the " U. P." (United Presbyterian) kirk looking 
gloomily down from just over the hedge. 



A Rural Hamlet 9 

The local *' polls" had headquarters a mile down 
the road, and a lone policeman was often in the village, 
but he never interfered with a drunken man as long as 
he was moderately peaceable. If a man fell by the 
wayside, the poHs let him lie there. 

The U. P. Church was at the end of the front row 
of the village, and immediately behind it was the Free 
Kirk, at the end of the back row. Both were plain, 
small edifices of stone. The U. P. was entirely with- 
out ornament, but the Free had a tiny porch at the 
entrance, and up aloft on the peak was perched a little 
cupola with a bell in it, while at the rear of the edifice 
was a vestry. The diminutive size of this vestry made 
it seem as if it had been built for a joke. Here is Ian 
Maclaren's realistic description of it from " Beside the 
Bonnie Brier Bush " : — 

" The Free Kirk people were very proud of their 
vestry because it was reasonably supposed to be the 
smallest in Scotland. It was eight feet by eight, and 
consisted largely of two doors and a fireplace. Lockers 
on either side of the mantelpiece contained the church 
library, which abounded in the lives of the Scottish 
worthies, and was never lightly disturbed. Where 
there was neither grate nor door, a narrow board ran 
along the wall, on which it was a point of honor to 
seat the twelve deacons, who met once a month to 
raise the sustentation fund. Seating the court was a 



lo The Land of Heather 

work of art, and could only be achieved by the repres- 
sion of the smaller men, who looked out from the loop- 
holes of retreat, the projection of bigger men, on to 
their neighbors* knees. Netherton was always the 
twelfth man to arrive, and nothing could be done till 
he was safely settled. Only some six inches were re- 
served at the end of the bench, and he was a full sitter, 
but he had discovered a trick of sitting sideways and 
screwing his leg against the opposite wall, that secured 
the court as well as himself in their places, on the prin- 
ciple of a compressed spring. When this operation 
was completed, Burnbrae used to say to the minister, 
who sat in the middle on a cane chair before the tiniest 
of tables — 

" ' We're fine and comfortable noo. Moderator, and 
ye can begin business as sune as ye like.' " 

Ian Maclaren, or, to use his real name, the Rev. 
John Watson, was the minister of the Free Kirk in 
early life and lived in the adjoining manse, a substan- 
tial and pleasant house that in its situation is uncom- 
monly favored ; for it turns its back to the village and 
looks down on a sweet little dell through which rambles 
a clear, pebbly brook. The view from the manse is 
extensive, and to the north the hills sweep up finely to 
dim ranges of the Grampians dreaming in the distance. 

The Drumtochty folk esteemed Dr. Watson a very 
clever man, but they did not care much for his writ- 



A Rural Hamlet ii 

ings, aside from the interest stirred by their purely local 
flavor. His descriptions of character, and the humor 
and the pathos, were largely lost on them. When the 
" Brier Bush " stories first appeared the U. P. minister 
in his delight over them read one of the most laughter- 
provoking chapters at a meeting of his elders. But 
the elders were perfectly imperturbable, and sat un- 
moved to the end. The minister did not repeat the 
experiment. 

The inhabitants saw nothing of story interest about 
the region or about themselves ; and if truth be told, 
any visitor who goes there expecting something extraor- 
dinary will be disappointed. Surrounding nature is 
by no means especially picturesque or beautiful, and 
Hfe runs the usual course of labor, gossip, and small 
happenings. It is the author's skill that transforms 
all this in the books and makes ideal and heroic much 
that in the reality seems dull and commonplace to the 
uninspired observer. 

One book character of whom I often heard was 
Dr. Leitch, who, a good deal modified, is the lovable 
Dr. Maclure of the " Brier Bush." He had been dead 
now a score of years, and I saw his grave among the 
others that huddled about the gray walls of the Estab- 
lished Kirk in the little parish burying-ground. But 
the doctor was never any hero to the Drumtochty 
folk. Their view was quite disparaging. He was a 



12 The Land of Heather 

picturesque figure, awkward and rudely clad, and his 
professional methods were as crude as his outward 
appearance. Still he was a fairly good doctor when 
you caught him sober. It was proverbial in Drum- 
tochty that he was all right if his services were asked 
when, mounted on his white horse, he was riding east; 
but when he was returning west he was sure to have 
visited the public and was worse than no doctor at all. 
Often, on his way home, he was so exuberant with 
the " mountain dew " he had imbibed that he rode 
along like a mad man, swinging his hat on his stick 
and singing, " Scots wha ha'e wi' Wallace bled," at the 
top of his voice. 

Of all the people who figure in Dr. Watson's narra- 
tives perhaps the one who was copied most faithfully 
from life is the guard of the Kildrummie train. Kil- 
drummie, six miles distant from Drumtochty, is the 
nearest railway town. A short branch line extends to 
it from the main route that connects Perth with Crieff, 
and a single train runs back and forth between the 
town and the junction. This is pulled by a super- 
annuated little engine which is said to sometimes 
fail on the up grade so that the passengers have to 
get out and push. The guard, or conductor, as we 
would call him, is the Peter Bruce of the " Brier 
Bush " stories to perfection, and every reader of the 
tales who journeys to Drumtochty recognizes him at 



A Rural Hamlet 13 

once and always calls him Peter, entirely independent 
of the fact that his real name is " Sandy " Walker. 
It was a pleasure to watch this gray little old man, 
he was so bustling and good-natured, and his eyes were 
so full of twinkle. He looked after the welfare of the 
passengers as attentively as if they were his children, 
and it seemed to come natural for him to get ac- 
quainted with all strangers and to find out their 
business the first time they rode on his train. 

He always spoke as if he did not relish the notoriety 
the books brought him, yet I fancy his protests were 
mainly bluff. Probably it will be a long time before 
he sues Dr. Watson for "defamation of character,'* as 
he hinted was his intention. He did his best to 
correct romance by a relation of the actual circum- 
stances. 

" Oh, I ken Watson fine ! " he said, " but thae 
books are two-thirds lees. The Drumtochty men 
were aye a drunken lot. It's a' very true aboot their 
stannin' aroon' on the Junction platform, but it 
wasna for the clatter that Watson tells aboot — it 
v/as because they was too drunk to know enough to 
get on the train. Mony's the time they had to be 
put on — pushed into their places like cattle, or lifted 
like bags o' grain." 

No doubt Peter's trials with the stubborn farmers 
of the uplands made him take an extreme view of 



14 The Land of Heather 

their failings ; but it was true that the Drumtochty 
folk were addicted to liquor beyond anything I am 
familiar with in rural America. Nearly all the farmers 
drank in moderation, and even a church elder could 
stagger after a visit to Perth without losing caste. 

Yet whatever their lacks, past or present, one would 
have to travel far to find people more kindly and 
whole-souled. They make hospitahty a fine art, and 
if you asked a favor, even of some old farmer in gar- 
ments that would shame a scarecrow, it was sure to be 
granted with a courtesy that won your affection on the 
spot. Another attraction which the Drumtochtians 
possessed in common with all the Scotch was their 
peculiar patois. The burr was always present, and 
they never failed to roll their rs, while a ch was 
sounded low in the throat in a way that made you 
wonder enviously how the children had ever caught 
the knack of pronouncing it. When reference was 
made to anything diminutive the ending ie or y was 
commonly added, and the word thus softened and 
caressed was very pleasant to the ear, and a decided 
improvement, I thought, over plain EngHsh. The 
only time I had any doubts about this extra syllable 
was wh^n a woman spoke of her " Mary's Httle gravy," 
not meaning any portion of the family bill of fare, but 
the spot in the burial-place where lay a child she had 
lost. 



A Rural Hamlet 15 

Perth was the commercial centre of the district, 
and business or pleasure, or more likely a combina- 
tion of the two, took most of the people of Drum- 
tochty there very frequently. The Kildrummie train 
was not the only public conveyance thither. Twice a 
week a short omnibus, or " brake " as it was called, 
made the journey, starting from Drumtochty in the 
early morning and returning the same evening. The 
round trip was twenty-two miles. It was not as tire- 
some as one might fancy — at least that was my expe- 
rience on the only occasion I took advantage of the 
vehicle. I recall the return journey with most inter- 
est. The brake stood by the curbing on Perth's chief 
street ready to start when I climbed in. A moment 
later the driver came out from a near public, mounted 
to his seat and off we went. 

But we had not gone far when a small boy in a 
tradesman's apron came shouting along the street 
after us with a great bundle in his arms. Other boys, 
nearer, took up the cry, and our driver became cog- 
nizant of the hubbub and halted until the lad came 
panting to the wagon side and passed up his bundle. 
Again we started, and again we were stopped almost 
immediately by a woman, who hailed us from the 
sidewalk. She chmbed in, but pretty soon said she 
was in the wrong brake, and had the driver let her 
out. The horses had just begun to trot once more 



1 6 The Land of Heather 

when we heard a halloo in the far distance behind, and 
saw two women and a man hastening in our pursuit, 
all three laden with a great variety of parcels. We 
waited for them and they squeezed in, stowed what 
parcels they could under the seats, and handed the 
surplus to the driver to be packed away in front. 
Some of the passengers were in danger of finding their 
sittings cramped, but when the driver questioned them 
they always said they were fixed " fine," and everybody 
tried to make everybody else as comfortable as possible. 

Thus we jogged on up and down the hills until we 
began to near our destination. Every now and then 
in this part of our journey one or more of the pas- 
sengers would call to the driver, and he would pull 
in his horses and roll down from his seat to help 
them in alighting. This done, and the bundles 
handed out, he said, " Good nicht, and thank you 
kindly," and we were off once more. Often people 
on the watch would run out from wayside houses to 
get parcels brought by the driver or to meet friends, 
and sometimes a lone boy would be in waiting at the 
entrance to a lane that led away to a farmhouse. In 
the village itself there was quite a bustle of unloading, 
with half the inhabitants loitering in home doorways, 
or on the sidewalk, watching proceedings. 

During my stay in Drumtochty hardly a day passed 
in which I did not get out for a walk, and I gradually 




Kathie scrubs the Front Walk 



A Rural Hamlet 17 

explored all the region within tramping distance. I 
became familiar with the windings of the Tochty, as 
the river in the hollow was called, and knew where it 
was swift and stony, and where it was quiet and deep. 
I followed up the side ravines through damp woods 
and open fields. I climbed ragged, rocky gorges where 
were constant waterfalls sliding into dark pools — ideal 
lurking-places for the wary trout. I acquired the names 
of all the burns and of several lesser rivulets that the 
natives called burnies. It did not take me long to 
learn the village with its front row and back row, and 
its three or four narrow lanes, nor the main road for a 
number of miles east and west ; but the byways and 
field paths, the farms and the outlying pasture lands, 
were not as easily conquered. 

I often went up in the evening to the edge of a 
moor, a half-mile back on the strath. There I would 
Hnger till after sundown. This upland was perfectly 
treeless and stretched away in a boggy level to some 
low hills far off in the west. Occasional sheep picking 
about gave almost the only hint that the land was of 
any human use. Once I saw five brown deer grazing 
in the distance, but usually, except for the sheep, I had 
no company save the peewits and whaups (curlews) and 
other "muirfowl" which screamed and flapped about 
in the twilight, making great ado over my presence. 
The whaups were strange, large birds with long, bent 



1 8 The Land of Heather 

bills and a cry that was particularly harsh and wild, 
and the notes of all the muirfowl were uniformly 
forlorn and complaining. They were creatures of the 
barren wastes, and the sombreness of their surround- 
ings had apparently driven out all music. 

A crooked, faintly marked path crossed the muir to 
some farms in a glen on its farther side, and in the 
wettest places were stepping-stones to make the narrow 
footway more passable. It was not a path for a stranger 
to undertake, and at night it was dangerous even for 
one familiar with it ; for the trail was so slight it was 
easily lost, and one might anywhere stumble into the 
old peat holes with their dark, treacherous pools lying 
like traps in waiting. Horny tangles of whins (furze) 
were frequent, still yellow with rusty remnants of their 
spring blossoms. Similar tangles of broom were also 
common, and seemingly were hardly different from the 
whins until you observed closely, when you saw that 
the broom was thornless, its growth looser and its 
flowers of a fresher yellow. The predominant plant 
on the muir was the heather. Much of the land was 
matted out of sight by the wiry little bushes, and it 
was these gave the landscape its predominant tone of 
dusky olive. Mingled with the common heather or 
" ling " was the bell heather, already in bloom and 
making brave attempts to brighten the sombre pas- 
turage with its splashes of pink and red. 



A Rural Hamlet • 19 

Flowers were abundant everywhere in Drumtochty, 
and I always returned from my walks with my hands 
full. I filled every vase in the shoemaker's house, 
much to the perturbation of my landlady, who thought 
a fancy for wild flowers very queer taste. If she had 
followed the promptings of her own sense of fitness, she 
would have thrown my untamed nosegays all out at 
the back door, and put stiff bouquets of garden flowers 
in their place. Among the rest of my gatherings I 
picked occasional sweet-odored wild hyacinths and the 
shy moor-violets. In favored places by the roadside 
I found ladies' delights, and along the stone walls tall, 
gaudy foxgloves and the humble " craws'-taes " and 
the delicate eyebright, or "cats'-een," as the children 
called it. Bordering the ditches and marshy hollows 
the forget-me-nots grew freely, sometimes making a 
blue mass that at a little distance was easily mistaken for 
a bit of quiet water reflecting the sky. The neglected 
ravines were gay with wild roses, some white, some 
red, and others of varying tints of pink ; and in the 
same ravines a little later the straw-colored honey- 
suckle flowers tiptoed out from their green chambers 
and looked at their reflections in the streams they 
overhung. 

One of the diversions of my walks was the glimpses 
I was sure to catch of the rabbits, or " moppies," to 
use the language of the Scotch children. They fed on 



20 The Land of Heather 

the edges of the woods and fields, and when they heard 
my footsteps, up they sat on their haunches, all alert 
to interrogate the nature and intents of the intruder, 
and then they went bobbing away in great terror to their 
holes in the banks along the hedges. They were such 
gentle, domestic little creatures, with their sensitive ears 
and stubby tails, and had such a soft, twinkling way 
of flying to cover when they took fright, that I al- 
ways welcomed encounters with them, no matter how 
frequent. 

Gulls were common at this season in the Drumtochty 
neighborhood, for it was their nesting time, and they 
had come inland to breed. They made their homes 
by hundreds in the reeds at the borders of a shallow 
pond a few miles up the valley. I saw their white 
wings flipping about at all hours of the day, and no- 
ticed them frequently feeding with "craws" in the newly 
ploughed fields. I often heard the skylarks singing 
in their aerial flights, and there were great numbers of 
other song-birds, many of them tame almost to the 
point of sociability. Their companionableness was 
evidenced most clearly by the way they would hop 
along the roadway and the hedges in my vicinity, and 
by their approaching to within arm's-length when I 
sat down in a woodland coppice or among the alders 
that fringed a streamside. 

I perhaps ought to say before leaving this subject 




A Wall of Crockery 



A Rural Hamlet 21 

that my walks were not always an unmixed pleasure. 
There were times when the midges attacked me, 
and it was astonishing that such tiny creatures could 
be so irritating — " awfu* wild Httle things'' my land- 
lady called them. They were so persistent and so hard 
to catch, and their bites were so discomforting, that 
I concluded I would rather take my chances among 
our American mosquitoes. But the midges had one 
virtue the mosquitoes have not — they confined their 
operations to out-of-doors. There was the more 
reason for thankfulness in this because the houses 
usually furnished other creatures to battle with. 

Among other places to which I was attracted in my 
rambles was Trinity College, across the Tochty. It 
has a noble square of buildings, and looks as if it might 
have been transplanted from Cambridge or Oxford. To 
it come yearly several hundred sons of the gentry from 
all over the kingdom to prepare there for the universi- 
ties. Their ages vary from eight to fifteen years, and 
to such youngsters the immediate surroundings of the 
college were, I thought, particularly attractive. The 
grounds themselves included wide sweeps of lawn that 
gave ample opportunities for games, and there was a 
shooting-range, and there were swimming holes con- 
veniently near in the Tochty, while the neighboring 
hills and dales, with their patches of woodland, their 
moors and trout brooks, offered many varied pleasures. 



22 The Land of Heather 

In what I saw of the college interior I was most 
impressed by an apartment set full of ancient battered 
desks that looked as if they had been suffering at the 
hands of youthful savages of the schoolroom from time 
immemorial. They were in truth so dark and grim 
as to be more suggestive of a penal institution than a 
modern school ; yet both students and faculty are very 
proud of these desks. They take pains to show them 
to all visitors, and call attention to the fact that there 
are very few schools in Britain that can boast of any- 
thing older or more defaced by accumulated scratch- 
ings and carvings. The desks were heavy, rudely made 
affairs, standing back to back. On top rose a series of 
bookshelves which apparently separated the boy on 
one side from the lad who sat facing him on the other 
side very effectively. But closer observation showed 
that the boys always kept a friendly hole cut through 
the partition. In decided contrast with the desks 
were the modern electric lights with which the room 
was fitted. Pride in antiquity did not go to the length 
of studying by candle-light. 

The students in their dress were quite unlike the 
local inhabitants of the district. On week days they 
went about hatless in all sorts of weather, and wore 
a very light costume that left the knees bare. In 
winter, too, hatless heads and bare knees were still the 
fashion, and frost and faUing snow made no difference. 



A Rural Hamlet 23 

The boys discarded head-coverings to promote the 
growth of their hair, and the scantiness of their other 
apparel was imagined to assist them in acquiring an 
athletic toughness. But on Sundays there was a 
change. Then they wore chimney-pot hats and blue 
suits, with long trousers and Eton jackets, and they 
looked like grown men boiled down. 

My home while in Drumtochty was, as I have men- 
tioned, at the shoemaker's. The house was one of 
several joining walls in the front row of the village. 
It had four rooms. Of these I had the parlor and 
bedroom, while the shoemaker, with his wife and two 
children, occupied the kitchen and scullery. In a 
corner of the kitchen was a bed, and by the fireplace 
was a great, wide chair that could be opened out and 
made into a sort of crib. This chair-crib was pushed 
up beside the bed every night, for the use of the little 
girl, Cathie. Jamie, the boy, slept next door, at his 
grandmother's. 

All the humbler village homes were like the shoe- 
maker's, in having one or more beds in the kitchen. 
Often the bedsteads were simple modern frameworks 
of iron, but in many instances they were old-fashioned 
box-beds, more like cupboards or closets than beds. 
But the main feature of a kitchen was always a black 
fireplace, its lower half filled across by a " grate." 
This grate consisted of an oven on the right hand, 



24 The Land of Heather 

and a tank for hot water on the left, between which 
was an open space for the fire with bars across the 
front. Most of the cooking was done on griddles 
and in pots that were either set on the coals or hung 
over the blaze from the crane. To start the fire, dry- 
twigs of broom, cut on the near braes (hillsides), were 
first put on, then a few sticks of kindhng-wood added, 
and on top of all, some of the great lumps of soft coal 
that are used nearly everywhere in Britain. The 
broom, when it was touched off, made a very brisk and 
pleasant crackling, and the fire itself, as long as it 
burned, lent to the most commonplace apartment a 
relieving touch of cheerfulness. I greatly enjoyed my 
parlor fire, and on days of driving rain and chilHng 
winds, often sat long before it, watching the dancing 
and beckoning of the rosy sprites released from the 
prisoning coals. 

At the approach of mealtime my landlady would 
come in, put a white spread over the centre table, and 
set forth various dishes from the parlor cupboard. 
Then she brought from the kitchen the food she had 
prepared. I fared simply, yet always had what was 
good, and plenty of it. I liked to eat real Scotch 
foods, and I had bannocks and scones at every meal, 
and pancakes and kail-broth not unfrequently. Break- 
fast invariably began with a soup-plate full of the 
coarse oatmeal of the region, but I drew the line at 



A Rural Hamlet 25 

eating it without sugar, though my landlady assured 
me that the only proper way to eat it was with milk 
only. Nor could I quite reconcile myself to the 
Scotch butter. It has an individuality of its own, and 
when I first tried it I had the notion I was eating 
some new sort of cheese. But the trouble was that 
the butter was unsalted. The Scotch prefer it so, and 
even at fashionable hotels fresh butter is set before 
you, unless you request something different. 

My meals at the shoemaker's were served very 
tidily, but this was not typical of the family meals in 
the other part of the house. I suppose the kitchen 
and little room behind it, known as the scullery, had 
to serve too many purposes to be very neat. They 
were crowded and disorderly, and it was a mystery how 
the housewife managed to get through all her work 
without coming to grief. The family had an exceed- 
ingly plain bill of fare, and they were very economical 
in the use of dishes. They rarely, if ever, ate together, 
but each one sat down when he or she found it con- 
venient. The few eatables that made a meal were 
always close at hand, and it took only a moment to 
put them on the table. Cathie was the last to eat in 
the morning. She lay abed till after eight, and when 
she did get up she breakfasted in her nightgown. 
With her knees on a chair and her elbows on the bare 
boards of the kitchen table the towsled little girl 



26 The Land of Heather 

would finish her plate of porridge and call out, " Maw, 
got my tea ready ? " 

She had to have tea with every meal, but her mother 
took care it should be very weak. After breakfast 
followed dressing and making ready for school, and 
then a mate would come to the door and both little 
girls would walk away up the road, hand in hand, each 
W'ith a dinner bag strapped over her shoulder. In the 
home doorway stood Cathie's mother and watched the 
bairns till an intervening hedge hid them from sight. 

The shoemaker ate with his hat on unless the occa- 
sion was one of those special times when company was 
present and the kitchen table had been made imposing 
with a white spread. But there was nothing peculiar 
about his keeping on his head-covering. Every Scot 
wears his "bonnet" in his own house. It is a sign 
that he is at home and not visiting. Some say the cap 
is the first thing he puts on when he gets out of bed in 
the morning and the last he takes off at night ; and 
there are Scotch workmen in America who, having eaten 
supper bareheaded out of deference to the customs of 
the land of their adoption, will get their caps and wear 
them the rest of the evening, even if they stay indoors 
until they retire. 

The scullery at my boarding-place was a nondescript 
room with many shelves along the walls and numbers 
of tubs, kettles, and odds and ends about the floor. 



A Rural Hamlet 27 

The back door was here, and just outside were pails to 
receive the refuse and dirty water of the household.. 
These pails were carried up into the garden and 
emptied only when necessity compelled. 

The kitchen was hardly less generously supplied 
with shelves and cupboards than the scullery. Promi- 
nent among these was the dresser, or "wall of 
crockery," opposite the fireplace. The lines of 
plates and cups and other decorated ware on the 
dresser, and the row of mugs pendent along a near 
beam, were kept in shining order if none of the other 
household furnishings were. I think the wall of 
crockery, the stiff best room, and the little patch of 
flowers at the front door were the three chief points 
of pride in most cottage homes. 

The gardens between the two village rows were 
planted to tatties (potatoes), kail, cabbages, onions, 
peas, etc. In a sunny corner would be a bunch of 
enormous rhubarb with stems as thick as one*s wrist 
and leaves a yard broad. Small fruits were represented 
by gooseberries, currants, strawberries, and "rasps." 
Often there was a cherry tree or two, and, more rarely, 
an apple tree. The most notable Drumtochty apple 
tree stood in the midst of the manse garden next the 
Free Kirk. This was a stunted, shrublike tree pruned 
down to about the height of a man. A record of its 
apples was carefully kept, and the minister was willing 



2 8 The Land of Heather 

to take his oath it had produced as many as 143 
in a single season. 

The shoemaker and his wife often worked together 
of an evening in their home garden. Cathie worked 
with them too, though her energies were mostly given 
to setting out in a neglected corner that she called her 
own various weeds and grasses that she had pulled up. 
Cathie was aged five. She was plump, red-cheeked, 
and good-natured, but with strangers was so shy she 
hardly let out a word, and she would drop her head the 
moment she caught any one looking at her. Among 
her companions or alone she was lively enough, and her 
tongue was capable of keeping on the trot all day long. 
Often she entertained herself by singing, and on a 
rainy day she would very likely play circus in the 
kitchen by the hour. She had seen a show at some 
time, and had taken a fancy to the tight-rope lady. So 
she would imagine herself in a spangled dress, lay a 
narrow board across two chairs and dance on that with 
an old Cuiie for a balancing stick. She at first begged 
for a rope to tie between the bedstead and the table, 
but her mother thought it best she should begin more 
humbly. Occasionally, when another little girl came 
in on a dull day, the two would play the dambrod 
(checkers) ; but Cathie was not clever at that, and after 
she had been beaten two or three times her opponent 
would say to her, " I'll hae to tak' afF yer heid an* 



A Rural Hamlet 29 

pit on a neep " (turnip), and then Cathie would refuse 
to play any more. 

Drumtochty and the country for miles round about 
was owned by the Earl of Mansfield. He was one of 
the richest of Scotch landed proprietors, and his resi- 
dence was at Scone Palace, near Perth. There was 
little liking for him among his tenantry, for he showed 
slight interest in their prosperity, and was quite content 
to see the farms degenerate into grazing moorland ; 
and such was his partisanship for the Established Kirk, 
of which he was a supporting pillar, that he discrimi- 
nated against dissenting tenants — at least this was com- 
mon report. But the clachan on the strath, although it 
belonged to the Earl, was not wholly in his power. It 
was built on land leased for a term of ninety-nine years, 
and about a quarter of this time was still unexpired. 
Houses and churches, both, were built by the people, 
but all would be the Earl of Mansfield's uncondition- 
ally in twenty-six years. Nevertheless, there was no 
fear of any special severity ; for, whatever might be a 
landlord's personal pleasure, he would not dare go 
against the public sentiment of the nation, and the 
dissenters will continue to have their kirks and their 
ministers. 

The district had become the property of the Earl 
comparatively recently. For many generations pre- 
vious it had been the domain of the Lairds of Logie, 



JO The Land of Heather 

whose ancient home still stands about a mile east of 
the village, not far from the Auld Kirk. In the early- 
part of the last century Logie House had been a fine 
mansion with beautiful grounds surrounding. Now 
the place has gone to decay, and the great mansion is 
unoccupied save by an old woman and her daughter, 
who have two rooms in the second story. It is in a 
retired spot well back from the main road, in its old- 
time park, and the quiet is such that the wild rabbits 
feed fearlessly in the grassy roadway right before the 
grand front door. If you go inside you are shown 
through many lofty rooms, with wall and ceilings 
bare and stained, their frescoing and marble fireplaces 
cracked, and their high windows staring curtainless out 
on the trees and shrubbery of the park. 

Back of Logie House is a still more ancient resi- 
dence of the Lairds of the district, larger and much 
more ruinous. The roof is gone, the upper floors 
have fallen, the walls are crumbling ; and grasses, rank 
weeds, bushes, and even good-sized trees grow in the 
old halls. I explored a secret hiding-place in a tower, 
where a winding stair crept up behind what had been 
a china closet, to a black pocket of a chamber above, 
and I went down into the gloomy passages and vaulted 
rooms of the cellar. Some of these underground 
rooms had grated windows, and were so dismally dark 
and damp that they were exact counterparts of the 



A Rural Hamlet 31 

traditional dungeon ; and the whole ruin was enchant- 
ing in its suggestion of mysteries, ghosts, and the 
rough fighting days of centuries ago. 

Logie House was perched high on a hill slope that 
commanded a long view down the winding valley of 
the Tochty. In the wooded depths of the hollow 
could be caught glints of the stream, and on a quiet 
day you heard its far-off murmur. A footpath threaded 
through the woodland down the valley, most of the 
way keeping high up on the edge of a precipitous 
bank, with the river a hundred feet or so below. The 
trees along this path were very fine. They grew clean 
and large and tall — firs, larches, pines, lime trees, and 
graceful beeches. The evergreen woods were perhaps 
the most attractive of all, not so much in themselves, 
however, as in the fact that no matter how thick the 
trees were the ground beneath was very sure td be 
delicately carpeted with thin green grasses. This 
light undergrowth was very pleasant to the eye, with- 
out being heavy enough to appreciably obstruct one's 
footsteps. Another thing noticeable in the woods was 
the absence of dead leaves on the earth. The climate 
is so damp they soon mould and become a part of 
the soil. The effect of the dampness was further 
shown by the heavy moss which grew on tree trunks, 
shadowed fences, and decayed branches, and frequently 
was so pronounced as to be shaggy and pendent. 



32 The Land of Heather 

In a forest dell, two miles down the path in the 
valley of the Tochty, is a rough cairn of stones which 
marks the spot where dwelt long ago Bessie Bell and 
Mary Gray of the old ballad. It was a time of plague, 
and these two young women, daughters of the nobility, 
fled from their homes and built a woodland hut here. 

" O Bessie Bell and Mary Gray, 
They war twa bonny lasses ! 
They bigget a bower on yon burn-brae. 
And theekit it o'er wi' rashes." 

In its seclusion they intended to live till the dan- 
gers of contagion were past. But their lovers pres- 
ently sought them out, and unfortunately at the same 
time brought the plague with them. Both maids 
took the disease and died. After their death the at- 
tempt was made to take their bodies to the town. 
But when the bearers came to the ford in the river 
some distance below, the authorities, fearful that the 
plague would be spread, refused to allow them to 
cross. So Bessie Bell and Mary Gray were buried 
by the waterside near the ford, and now a weather- 
worn shaft of stone enclosed by a rusty, decrepit square 
of iron fence marks their grave. Close by is a second 
cairn of stone, which no doubt was piled up to mark 
the maidens' resting place long before the monument 
within the iron fence was erected. The great trees 







LoGiE Ruin 



A Rural Hamlet S3 

tower up overhead and make the glade below very- 
shadowy and quiet save for the unceasing ripple of 
the near stream ; and the day I was there the stillness 
and wildness of the spot were accentuated by the ap- 
pearance of a little mouse that crept in and out of the 
crannies of the stone heap. 

As I was loitering along the path on my way back 
to Logie House I was overtaken by an old shepherd 
with a crook in his hands and a collie at his heels. 

" It's vera warum thae day/' he remarked by way 
of greeting. 

The Drumtochty folk never said " Good morning," 
or, "Good afternoon," but instead made some com- 
ment on the weather, declaring it was warum, cauld, 
stormy, or whatever it happened to be at the moment. 
Their statements did not always seem very Hteral. 
For instance, "stormy" simply meant windy, while 
" rain " was a term only used to express the super- 
lative. The drops might be falling thick and fast, 
and yet a man responding to a friend who had 
mentioned that it was " Shoorie like," would be apt 
to say, " Ay, Tammas, but there'll no be ony rain." 

A rain in Scotland means an all-day downpour. 
This kindly view of the weather was further illus- 
trated by their calling any day " fair," no matter how 
gloomily clouded the sky, so long as there was no 
actual precipitation. According to the shoemaker's 



34 The Land of Heather 

wife, if on a threatening day the water drops had de- 
scended "to the roof o' the hoose and werena come 
doon to the ground yet, we wad say it was fair — 
fair, but a bit dull like." 

The old shepherd showed an inclination to be so- 
ciable, and I kept on in his company. He said his 
age was eighty, but that he still kept at his work and 
walked many miles daily. Nearly all his long life had 
been spent in tramping the Drumtochty moorlands 
within a narrow radius of his home. But there had 
been one journey to the outside world that took him 
as far as the royal castle at Balmoral. He recalled 
this trip with peculiar pleasure and animation. He 
advised me that I must not fail to see the castle, too, 
and he would recommend that I should view it from 
a certain hill. Seen thence he declared it did look 
beautiful and " stood up juist as white and fine as a 
new-starched shirt." 

On his visit to Balmoral the shepherd had seen a 
man who was making a tour of Scotland exhibiting 
his prowess as an archer, " and he was an Ameerican, 
like yoursel'," the shepherd explained — "a cannibal, 
aye, one o' them Injun fellers.'' 

Then he told of one of his relatives who had lived 
in America and now had returned to his native Scot- 
land, and who said that nothing could induce him to 
marry an American woman. Rather than that he 



A Rural Hamlet 



35 



would " coom awa' hame and marry a tinker (gypsy), 
because thae Ameerican weemen's na Strang. Their 
lungs gang awa' frae them." 

It was the shepherd's impression that we Ameri- 
cans still lived in the midst of the primeval forests, 
through which roamed all sorts of savage and raven- 
ous beasts. He made particular inquiry about our 
American snakes, and said he had been told about a 
"sarpint" twelve feet long, and he understood that 
such " sarpints " crawled into our houses and under 
our beds ! 















0i 


ii 




IM 


L 




fi:4w 


^^^ 




i\ 


^n^ ^"^x 


"w 


K^ 






%) 




■^&.^„.. 


•"-"-/<gv^ 


Hi 






-^^^^ 




£ 



Conducting her Coo to Pasture 



II 



VILLAGE HAPPENINGS 



IN a grass-plot 
at the borders 
of many of 
the Drumtochty 
gardens was a well 
that served for two 
or three neighbor- 
ing families. It 
would be eight or 
ten feet deep, and 
was covered by a 
large flat stone that 

Cuddling for Trout " j^^ jg^^j ^j^^ the 

ground. This stone had a hole in the middle, four- 
teen or fifteen inches in diameter, and the hole was 
protected by a slab of wood. Water was drawn by 
means of a pail with a rope attached. I think I never 
saw a man drawing or carrying water except Auld 
Robbie Rober'son, who Hved alone. It was woman's 
work. Every day I noticed several of the women 

36 



^,^^te" 




^^^fcra 


^ 


^^^^^^■^^P 


p& 


1^^^ 




^^^Hr::^^^^^!^ 




^'^^W 





Village Happenings 37 

burdened with their pails pass my lodgings on their 
way home from a well next door. The husbands never 
thought of relieving their wives even when their own 
day's labor was over and they were sitting smoking 
their pipes and lazily visiting on the street walls. Nor 
did it apparently ever occur to the women that the 
task was otherwise than distinctly theirs. Its pre- 
ordained character was not, however, as clear to me, 
and one day I started to draw a pailful at the next- 
door well. " Granny," the shoemaker's mother, whose 
years were more than fourscore, caught me in the act, 
and came hurrying out from the house much shocked 
that I, a man, and a lodger at that, should attempt 
such a thing. She took the rope from me and insisted 
on doing the work herself. 

Drawing water was not the only outdoor task which 
fell to the lot of the women. In several instances a 
village family owned a cow, and the housewife fed and 
milked it in the byre, and led it to and from pasture. 
The pig-pen, too, was included in the feminine sphere, 
and when it needed replenishing the woman thought 
nothing of walking off several miles and bringing home 
a small porker in a bag slung over her shoulder. 

I observed that at many of the houses the weekly 
washing was done in the narrow hallways, no doubt 
owing to the overcrowded condition of the small 
kitchens ; but not a few women preferred to make the 



38 The Land of Heather 

task an open-air one. In that case the tubs were set 
up at the back of the house, and near by a fire was 
started, and over it was hung the big black pot in 
which was heated a supply of water. The drying 
which followed the cleansing was sometimes accom- 
plished by hanging the clothes on lines, but more 
often they were spread on the grass or trailed over the 
hedges. When the wash was taken in, the starched 
things were sorted out, while the rest — the towels, 
underwear, and sheets — were carefully folded and 
placed in a pile on the floor, and a cloth laid over them. 
On this pile the housewife stood while she ironed the 
starched goods, and by the time she had finished, the 
clothes beneath her feet were pressed so smooth that 
to iron them would have been superfluous. 

June was the most notable month of the washer- 
women's year, for that is the time of the " blanket- 
scouring.'* The work could be executed after a fashion 
indoors, but the approved Scotch method is to put the 
blankets in a tub and tramp them clean with bare feet, 
and it is essential that there should be plenty of water 
and likewise plenty of elbow-room. Therefore nearly 
every Drumtochty housewife seeks the burn in the 
Free Kirk hollow when she feels inspired to undertake 
the blanket-washing. Usually two neighbors combine 
in doing the work. A fire is built by the streamside, 
and a great pot of water is suspended over it. Later 




A Village We 



LL 



Village Happenings 39 

the women trundle down several tubs on their rude 
barrows, and return for the blankets, which they bring, 
loaded in great heaps on the barrows, with a generous 
supply of soap-bars on top. When everything is 
ready, the workers remove their shoes and stockings, 
step into the tubs, and tread and splash the soapy water 
about with great energy. This tub dance is kept up, 
with occasional intermissions to turn the blankets or 
add fresh water, until the blankets are thoroughly clean. 
Now follows wringing — a hand-twisting process in 
which two women work together. Then the blankets 
are spread on the grass to dry. The whole operation 
seemed to me curiously primitive, but by the Drum- 
tochty folk it was considered the simplest, most natural, 
and best way to do such work that could be devised, 
and they asked me with wonder if we did not scour 
our blankets the same way in America. 

One result of the outdoor toil which fell to the lot 
of the village mothers was that they often had to leave 
their children to take care of themselves. Even when 
the mothers were at home, the crowded inconvenience 
of the living rooms made the house interior a poor 
place for youthful amusement, and in fair weather the 
children for the most part sought the street. 

The road was gritty macadam, hard on shoes and 
harder still on the toddlers' arms and shins, which the 
prevailing fashion in British infant garments left bare. 



40 The Land of Heather 

Conditions did not favor ideal cleanhness, and on days 
when they were not in school the children were apt to 
accumulate dirt in a way that would make a respectable 
pig ashamed of himself The majority of them ran 
around barefooted and bareheaded, and often were on 
the street or about the fields from early morning till 
late evening. No doubt these long doses of outdoor 
air and sunshine added materially to their hardiness, 
for as a rule they were healthy and rosy-cheeked, and 
I wondered if there would not be more color in the 
cheeks of our American children if they were turned 
loose in something the same manner. 

The Drumtochty children all hated to wear shoes, 
but there were certain of the parents who thought that 
an unshod child lacked a little of complete respectabil- 
ity. The shoemaker was one of these, and he told 
Jamie, greatly to the latter's grief, not to go barefoot 
to school. Jamie was in most ways faithful and obedi- 
ent, but this was a trifle too much, and often he was no 
sooner out of sight of the house than he slipped off his 
shoes and hid them behind a dyke (stone wall). He 
would resume them when he returned from school in 
the afternoon, and thus things continued until one day 
he forgot where he had left them. He searched in vain, 
and had to come home barefoot. As a consequence his 
father laid down the law more strictly than ever, and 
Jamie appeared in school shod afterward. 



Village Happenings 41 

For the mothers who lived in the front row of the 
village the roadway playground was very well situated. 
It was always under their eyes, and they were often 
stepping out to make sure the bairns were still in 
sight, and perhaps to order them in if they were get- 
ting unruly or quarrelsome. Sometimes the interfer- 
ence was for a lesser reason, as when my landlady, 
observing Cathie stand still and try to get some- 
thing from beneath her clothing at the back of her 
neck, called out, "Coom here, Cathie, what's the 
maitter wi' ye ? " 

" There's soomthin' doon ma neik," repHed the 
little girl. 

" Then coom into the hoose this minute," com- 
manded her mother. " It's like it's soom beast. I'll 
na hae ye pullin' at yer claes on the street." 

Just as she was starting off with Cathie, she noticed 
a little fellow standing somewhat aside from the others, 
with a handkerchief bound about his face, and she 
paused to ask, " What's the maitter wi' your haid ? " 

" Ma haid's swulled wi' the buffets " (mumps), was 
the doleful reply. 

" Coom, Cathie," exclaimed the shoemaker's wife, in 
greater trepidation than ever ; " hurry, lass ! Div ye no 
hear that ? Buffets and beasts too ! Ye maun stay 
indoors wi' me ! " 

A stile in the stone wall, across the road, was the 



42 The Land of Heather 

source of a good deal of pleasure to the younger 
children. No monkey ever got more enjoyment out 
of the perch in his cage, or went through more antics 
on it, than these little Scots did, on the stile opposite 
my window. When they tired of this, they sv/ung on 
the limbs of the plane trees that grew along the wall, 
or they went for a ramble after flowers in the field 
beyond. Most of this field over the wall had been 
ridged for " neeps," but it was cut in twain by a deep 
ravine or " den " where grew thorny tangles of furze, 
and where, every June, countless wild-rose bushes out- 
stretched their slender arms, piled high with blushing 
bloom. Indeed, the shrubbery and weeds grew so 
rankly that the depths of the den were quite choked 
and impassable. The children liked to roam around 
this ravine, and tumble on its sunny patches of grass, 
while they sorted their flowers, or busied their tongues 
with their small chatter ; or, it may be, forgot all else 
in careering down a clay bank, where they had worn a 
smooth, slippery slide. 

The upper edge of the den, on one side, was rimmed 
with a narrow path that led far down the brae, into the 
valley of the Tochty. Near the stream, in an amphi- 
theatre of grassy bluffs, was a bit of level meadow 
where the men of Drumtochty were wont to play 
kites (quoits). Saturday was the great day for the 
game, as the final afternoon of the week is a holiday 




Washing by the Burnside 



Village Happenings 43 

among Scotch artisans and tradespeople, and a large 
part of the village men were then free to use their time 
as they pleased. I had the chance to see a match 
game one Saturday. It was between the local club of the 
clachan and that of the neighboring hamlet of Nether- 
aird. The Netheraird team arrived in a brake at four 
o'clock and was taken at once up to the inn. The 
horses were put out, and the men all betook them- 
selves to the bar, to get a dram. I was told that with- 
out a dram it was impossible for a kiter to play. 
After a Hberal allowance of time for social chaffing and 
drinking at the public, the players went rambling over 
the stile opposite the shoemaker's, and on down the 
brae to the playground. The several circles of earth 
that were to serve as targets had already been prepared, 
and in the centre of each of these circles of freshly 
turned ground was an iron pin that barely projected 
into sight. The players, when they pitched their kites, 
aimed for that pin. 

When they were ready to begin in earnest, the men 
got off their coats and vests, and groups of lookers-on 
gathered about each dirt goal. Others, less intent, lay 
down on the near bank, where thickets of broom 
spread away up the hill. At one time the threaten- 
ing clouds rose darkly in the west, and we had a spat- 
ter of rain ; but this did not in the least interrupt the 
game, and the shower quickly blew eastward and a 



44 The Land of Heather 

double rainbow came out of the disappearing storm. 
The players were matched in groups of four, two on a 
side, and each of the opponent couples had a coach. 
The coach was a man with a pencil in his hand, and 
his pockets full of paper slips on which to keep tally. 
But the slips were used mostly to guide the throwers. 
The coach sticks one up in the dirt right by the pin, 
and shouts out, " Div ye see that paper ? That's 
your spot noo, lad. Be there for the life o' ye, 
WulHe ! " 

Wullie throws, and the coach, bending eagerly for- 
ward with his hands on his knees, thinks the kite is 
coming all right, and shouts, " I like ye ! " 

But the kite falls short, and the watcher jumps 
into the air and waves his arms distractedly and says, 
" Ahh ! " as though it was his last gasp. "Ye're a 
fut too weak," he calls across the field. " Ye're lazy, 
mon." 

The other side now has a turn, and Wullie's coach 
subsides into a watchful but calm spectator. Wullie, 
however, no sooner poises his ring for a cast than the 
coach springs forward, all on fire with eager intentness. 
He sets a fresh paper up in the dirt, puts his hands 
on each side of it to make the spot exact, and says : 
" Noo, Wullie, dirty that paper. There's plenty o' 
room here. Ye c'n dae it. Noo, be sure ! " 

The quoit comes flying through the air, and the 



Village Happenings 45 

watcher leaps aside and makes a gesture of despair 
when it strikes the farther edge of the circle. " Aw," 
he cries, " ye're Strang, mon — Oh, big a' thegither ! 
For the love o' guidness, Wullie, pu' up ! " 

So the game goes on, each side as excited as if the 
fate of the nation depended on their winning. But 
the excitement was superlative only on the part of the 
coaches, for the players saved their energies for care- 
ful pitching of the rings. As for the onlookers, they 
were in the main quiet observers, most of the men judi- 
cially puffing at their pipes. No ladies were present. 
Women do not attend games in the Scotch country, 
and you see no one feminine either at quoits or at the 
favorite winter game of curling. 

At the conclusion of the contest all the players went 
up to the inn, where the home club furnished a supper. 
The repast was simple — just cold meat, bread, cookies, 
and a mug of beer apiece. But this was only a pre- 
liminary. Treating was in order after the lunch had 
been disposed of, songs were called for, and the merry- 
making went on till the inn-closing time at ten o'clock. 

Perhaps the most important public event I wit- 
nessed in Drumtochty was an evening political meet- 
ing in the schoolyard. When I arrived I found 
standing at the roadside, close by the playground 
fence, a van something like a very substantial gypsy 
wagon. It was painted in the gayest of colors, and its 



46 The Land of Heather 

name, " The Thistle," was conspicuous in fancy letters 
on its sides, while the British flag was flying from a 
pole hoisted on the front of the car, giving the con- 
veyance an agreeable air of patriotism. In this van 
two men made their home and travelled through the 
country, months at a time, distilling wisdom among 
the rural folk all along their route. The horse that 
drew the van had been detached, and a platform had 
been let down over the shafts. The speakers, two 
stout, red-faced men, who looked like hearty eaters 
and hard drinkers, had descended from their domicile 
and were conversing with a knot of farmers. 

After a little, one of the orators requested such 
of the audience as were loitering in the roadway or 
perched on adjoining stone walls to go into the play- 
ground, where a number of backless benches from the 
schoolroom were grouped to serve the assemblage for 
seats. There were thirty or forty of us in all, mostly 
men and boys, but including two women and a small 
girl. The meeting was rather an informal affair, and 
some of the listeners had pipes lit and continued to 
puff* at them from beginning to end. First a chair- 
man was elected, and the old farmer chosen stepped 
out, cane in hand, and made a few rambling remarks 
intended to be introductory. Then one of the red- 
faced men gave us a talk from the car platform over 
the dyke. He sympathized with the farmers, who, 



Village Happenings 47 

he declared, were overtaxed, and he hoped and be- 
lieved things would soon be remedied. The second 
speaker said the same at more or less length, and 
then took up the matter of disestablishing the Scotch 
church, which was a measure that he by no means 
approved. The audience had found the overtaxation 
talk interesting and much to its liking, but there were 
many dissenters present to whom the speaker's oppo- 
sition to disestablishment was not palatable. Presently 
a man got up and said they wanted to hear about 
political matters — they hadn't come there to hear 
about the kirks. This led to some sharp bandying, 
with laughter and cheering from the audience. In the 
end the speaker went on in his own way, and at the 
close of his peroration there were votes of thanks all 
around, and applause, and promises on the part of the 
orators to come again in the autumn. I cannot say 
that I had been much impressed by their arguments, 
and I thought they were taken more seriously than 
they deserved. Their chief talent was a certain fluency 
and aptitude for talking in public. This saved them 
from dulness if it did not from shallowness, and I 
suppose what they said had some effect. 

These political speechmakers were the aristocrats of 
the road, and probably would not acknowledge any 
kinship to the " tinkers," even when the latter travelled 
in vans of the same type as theirs. Not all tinkers 



48 The Land of Heather 

had vans, however, for the term " tinker " was used to 
include all persons without a fixed abode — gypsies, 
beggars, tramps, and pedlers. Of the many represent- 
atives of these humble knights of the highway who 
visited Drumtochty the gypsies were the best equipped 
and often carried a considerable amount of merchan- 
dise. I recall one van so hung over and piled up with 
basket-ware that hardly a glimpse was to be had of 
the original vehicle. The structure towered aloft in 
a most astonishing and topheavy manner. Its pro- 
prietor gave his energies to driving the horse, while 
his wife, loaded with various chairs and flower-stands 
and other trappings, went from house to house trying 
to make sales. A half-grown girl sat in the doorway 
of the car with a baby of three weeks in her arms, and 
several other children played around inside and out. 
I did not count these youngsters, but the man told me 
he had eight children in all. He said he travelled all 
over the island, and that he had a smaller cart that was 
following behind. I looked inside the van and found 
it crowded with shelves and cupboards, used for storage 
and sleeping space, with a few feet reserved in one 
corner for a small open fireplace. 

Often two or three of the tinkers known as " pack 
folk'* would pass through the place in a single day. 
They carried their personal belongings and stock in 
trade on their backs, and I heard the village postmaster 



Village Happenings 49 

in a moment of humor refer to them as " commercial 
trivellers." At best they were considered a nuisance, 
and at worst, when they were coarse and drunken, it 
was decidedly unpleasant to find them within one*s 
home gate. A man tramp was likely to have a power- 
ful odor of whiskey about him, and ten to one the 
drink had made him the tramp he was. Late in the 
day he, with his pack and an empty bottle, was very 
apt to be found lying by the roadside dead drunk. 
He might even spend the night there in the ditch. 

The line separating pedlers from beggars was a 
very indistinct one, and the latter usually made some 
pretence of having the vocation of the former, for beg- 
ging pure and simple is unlawful. The women were 
the most inveterate of the beggars. They never lacked 
a pitiful tale to tell, and they had a whining, decrepit 
way at the door, not much in keeping with the vigor 
one would fancy was required for the amount of walk- 
ing they did. In many instances the female tinker had 
a baby in her arms, half supported from her shoulders 
by a shawl that was wound around both her and the 
child. Besides the baby she would carry a bundle in 
one hand and a heavy basket on her back, that in part 
at least contained goods for sale. Yet she does not 
thus burden herself so much in the hope of profit as 
to keep within the letter of the law, and though she 
goes through the form of attempting to trade at each 



50 The Land of Heather 

house, it is only by way of preface to her requests for 
" a drawing of tea," a bite to eat, and a charitable penny 
or bit of silver. Certain of the men tramps dispensed 
with the packs of notions altogether and lived by their 
wits; but none of the tinkers was accounted especially 
dangerous or dishonest. Still, " ye maun keep an eye 
open the whiles they're aroon." 

One "gaein' aboot body" with whom I talked was 
a dirty old woman who greeted me one day from a 
wayside heap of road metal (broken stone) on which 
she was resting. She had been carrying a big bundle 
strapped to her shoulders, but had loosened it for the 
moment. In addition she had with her a dangling 
bunch of rabbit skins that she had taken in exchange 
trades with farmers' wives. A wretched specimen of a 
shoe lay in her lap, and I noticed that one of her feet 
had no covering save a frayed stocking. She explained 
that the shoe was burst out and would keep slipping 
off, and it was easier to take it along in her hand than 
it was to wear it. She said she was only four weeks 
out of the poorhouse, where she had been laid up all 
winter with her liver. She was hardly able to get 
about, but she would rather do almost anything than 
bide in the workhouse ; so she was trying to earn a few 
pennies peddling with her pack. She had seven chil- 
dren. Some were in Australia, some in South Africa, 
and one in America, and there was another, a son, who 




Quoits — a Dispute 



Village Happenings 51 

had been " misfortunit, and had to run awaV' and she 
did not know where he was. A daughter had married 
well and was living in Aberdeen, and the daughter 
knew her mother's need, and so did some of the other 
children, but none of them offered her help, and she 
would rather die than ask it of them. She heaved a 
sigh, gave her nose a dicht (wipe), took up the rabbit 
skins, and shifted her bundle up to her shoulders. 
Then she rose stiffly from the stone heap, and I watched 
her melancholy figure hobble away down the road. 

Another tramp who interested me was a tall man 
with a touch of the dandy in the tilt of his hat and the 
curl of his long mustache. He said he was a clock- 
maker, and that he had been a soldier. He pulled 
back his sleeve and showed an arm covered with blue 
tattooing. The man's son, a slender, pinch-faced little 
boy, accompanied him, and bore a pack just like his 
father's, only smaller. The man was a hard drinker, 
and one could not but pity the lad tied to such a com- 
panion. The village people declared the man " gaed 
the wee laddie great lickin's," which was the more dis- 
tressing because the boy seemed a quiet little fellow, 
and not at all vicious. 

Toward the end of June there was a funeral in the 
clachan. It was a day of rain, and my window in 
the shoemaker's parlor was blurred with the drive of 
the storm, and the hills beyond the hollow where the 



52 The Land of Heather 

Tochty flowed were half misted from sight. The wind 
blew and kept the branches of the row of trees across 
the road tossing, and made a lonely sound about the 
eaves. I could hear the sparrows chirping forlornly 
somewhere in the neighborhood of the dwellings, and 
now and then I saw a gull flap down on one of the 
farm fields beyond the highway. 

The funeral was that of an old man who had died 
two days before, and this afternoon the men of the 
place put on their " Sabbath blacks '* and gathered 
about the door of the old man's dwelHng. Not many 
of them went inside, for the house was small and would 
accommodate few besides the relatives. It stood on 
the lane that led up to the inn on the back row, and a 
sombre hearse waited at the corner. When the short 
house service was concluded, the men mourners pre- 
pared to walk to the grave. The hearse headed the 
procession, and next came the clergyman in his shovel 
hat, closely followed by the rest of the company. The 
weather was so wet that every one carried umbrellas 
and wore waterproofs or overcoats, and thus the strag- 
gling group wended its way down the road toward 
the burying-ground, a good mile distant. 

The bee expert of the village, known as " The Auld 
Lad," had stepped in at the shoemaker's to see the 
procession pass, and I said to him it seemed too bad 
the funeral should come on so stormy a day ; but he 




A>V^^in V'^'^'> ''■^■ 



Gypsies 



Village Happenings . ^;^ 

thought it a good omen, and said it was an old saying 
in Scotland, — 

<* Happy is the bride that the sun shines on. 
Blessed is the corp that the rain poors on." 

In the Auld Kirk churchyard, which was the place 
of interment for all the hamlet, stood a substantial 
stone shed that had been pointed out to me as the 
" Deid Hoose." It occurred to me now to ask the 
Auld Lad about this building. In response he told 
how, when he was a schoolboy, " the students frae the 
medical colleges used to be hftin' the deid when they 
were first buried." 

For a long time the people all over Scotland 
watched each newly made grave every night during 
several weeks. The watchers kept their vigils in twos 
for the sake of company, and they always carried a 
"load gun" with them, and, what was of. hardly less 
consequence, a bottle of whiskey to alleviate the cheer- 
lessness of their occupation. They usually stayed in 
the church or a near house, looking out frequently, and 
going now and then to the grave. The warmth of 
summer might sometimes tempt them to stand guard 
outside, but " On a winter nicht it was cauld, mind 
ye," said the Auld Lad, " aye, and they didna care to 
be exposit." 

At last, to save this close watching of the graves. 



54 The Land of Heather 

the dead house was built. It had a floor of sand 
in which the coffins were buried about two feet deep, 
to be taken up at the end of five or six weeks for 
their final interment in the kirkyard. 

This talk about the dead house led the Auld Lad 
to relate the following bit of history. "There was 
a wuman," said he, " the wife o* a meenister, and 
the nicht aifter she was buried what did the bedrel 
(sexton) do but dig doon to the grave to get twa 
reengs he'd taken notice of on her feenger. But when 
he got to the body, he couldna pu' the reengs aff the 
feenger, and he was just cuttin' the feenger aff when the 
wuman turned in her coffin, mon, and said, ' Oh dear ! ' 

" Then she told the bedrel if he'd lat her oot, 
she'd never tell on him ; and the bedrel said he 
would ; and he helped her to the gate of her hoose, 
and she went, all in her grave-clothes, and rappit on 
the door. Her mon was inside, and he sayed, ' If ma 
wife wasna deid, I'd say that was her rap ; ' and he 
opened the door, and he lat her in, and at the fricht 
o' seein' her he fell richt ower backwards. But they 
brought him roond ; and the wuman lived sax years 
aifter that, and she had twa bairns, and one o' their 
names was Ralph Erskine — and, mon, that's a true 
story ! " 

About four o'clock of the day of the funeral the rain 
suddenly ceased, and the dun cloud-mass overhead 



Village Happenings 



55 



slid away into the east and left clear sky and sunshine 
behind. By evening the grass and earth were nearly 
dry, and the children were playing in the roadway and 
climbing along the dykes. Women with babies in 
their arms, and women without, stood at their gates, 
or their neighbor's gate, chatting, and now and then 
a man enjoying a quiet pipe of tobacco made one in 
a group. 




Spreading Blankets after the Wash 



Ill 



THE WAYS OF THE FARM FOLK 




T 



iHE Drum- 
tochty farm- 
ers complained 
a good deal of hard 
times, and in the 
last few years their 
profits had undoubt- 
edly been small ; yet 
they were careful, 
hardworking men, 
and the majority of 
them had money 
laid aside. Most of 
the farmhouses stood some distance from the main 
roads, at the end of a lane. I naturally expected, when 
I followed up one of these lanes, that it would lead me 
to the front door of the house, but the farm buildings 
were not arranged on the American plan. The houses 
turned their backs on the pubHc approaches, just as 
the mansions of the gentry do, and it was often a 
puzzle to find the front entrance at all. 

56 



A Servant Lassie 



The Ways of the Farm Folk 57 

I came to know many of the farmers, and among 
them one called " Hillocks/' who was especially 
friendly, and at whose house I was a frequent visitor. 
He was in reality a Mr. Crockett, but Hillocks was 
the name of his farm, and locally that was always his 
title. It was the same on the other farms of the 
glen — Ballandee, Clashiegar, Drumachar, Shilligan, 
etc., — their names and the names of their owners 
were identical to the neighbors, and when there was a 
change of tenants the new occupant was known by 
the old farm name, quite regardless of his own. 

Hillocks was a good farmer, and he was now very 
well-to-do, or, as the Scotch say, " had his pocket full 
o' bawbees " (halfpence). He v>^as elderly and bent, 
and wore a bushy fringe of gray beard standing out 
about his face, and had a stiff jungle of hair, that 
seemed to have had no very intimate acquaintance with 
a brush and comb of late. Although still hale and 
hearty, he had begun to feel the weight of years, and 
there were days when he spent most of his time just 
digging about the garden, or sitting by the kitchen fire. 
Yet he continued to be the first one up and about in 
the morning, and the last one to get to bed at night. 
His cares were many, both indoors and out, for his 
wife had been long dead, and he was the sole head of 
the household. 

I felt something like an explorer of strange lands 



58 The Land of Heather 

on my initial visit to Hillocks. The first buildings 
I encountered, as I walked up the lane to the farm- 
house, were a huddle of low stone sheds. Under 
the eaves of one of them, almost encroaching on the 
wagon-track of the lane, was a manure-heap with dark, 
slimy streams crawling away from it across the roadway 
to a green, offensive pool, where the farm ducks were 
nosing and paddHng. By going between two of the 
sheds I entered the farm " close," a bare earth yard 
walled in on three sides by the house and its outbuild- 
ings. A pet lamb with a bell tied to its neck ran out 
of the kitchen door to investigate me, and some 
loitering hens sidled about doubtfully, ready to take 
flight if I proved aggressive. Several heavy, two- 
wheeled carts, with their shafts tilted skyward, stood 
idle at one side, and there was a scattering of other 
farm machines. 

Near the back door was a heavy old pump, 
with an accompaniment of dirty puddles and a 
good deal of unsightly htter. I looked in vain for 
some other entrance. As a matter of fact, every one 
went in and out this rear door, except on the occasion 
of a wedding or funeral or a formal call from the 
minister, and I fancy that many of the farm folk were 
only half aware they had such an institution as a front 
door. Even for the minister, there was no way to 
approach it save by going up the lane past the byres 



The Ways of the Farm Folk 59 

and into the close. A narrow gate in a remote corner 
of the close gave admittance to a hedged garden, as I 
discovered later, and by following a gravelled path 
along the house wall one reached the front entrance. 
The garden was filled with vegetables and small fruits, 
and there was no lawn. But, to compensate, the walks 
were very tidy, and were bordered by box and flower- 
beds, while the gray stone sides of the house were 
relieved by vines and fruit trees trained to grow up on 
them. 

While I was hesitating in the close on my first visit 
to Hillocks, the housekeeper, an intelligent young 
woman with tousled hair, appeared at the back door 
and ushered me and the pet lamb into the kitchen, 
explaining, as she did so, that the lamb ran all over 
the house, upstairs and down. The room I was in had 
a paved floor, a wide fireplace, and deep windows. A 
few lines of colored crockery on the shelves of the 
dresser brightened the apartment a little, but on the 
whole it was dingy and dark, and devoid of ornament. 
The tables and chairs were as plain as it was possible 
to make them, and the tops of the former were half 
worn away with use and scouring. 

Some lumps of soft coal were burning in the fire- 
place, and to hasten the fire the housekeeper added 
several crooked sticks of wood which showed a per- 
verse tendency to roll out half burned on the floor, 



6o The Land of Heather 

keeping the room dusky with smoke. Suspended 
from the crane was a big girdle (a thin disk of iron 
sixteen or eighteen inches across, with a bail), on which 
the housekeeper was baking scones. Scones are great 
round cakes as large as a dinner plate and about three- 
quarters of an inch thick. They are something like 
soda biscuit, but are tougher, and are best eaten cold. 
In looks they are not at all dainty, nor even attractive, 
yet spread with butter and jam they are very palatable. 

I went in search of Hillocks presently. He was at 
the barn where the threshing-mill was running. Power 
was furnished by a long-armed turnabout, outdoors, to 
which four horses were attached. A man sat high on 
the hub of the contrivance, and as he revolved, en- 
couraged the horses with a long whip. Within the 
barn, up in a dusty loft, I found Hillocks, assisted by 
a boy and a wild-looking girl, putting unthreshed oats 
into the mill, while down below were several men 
taking care of the straw and oats as they came out. 
The work was nearly done, and soon Hillocks accom- 
panied me into the house. He was hospitality itself. 
" Ye're as welcome as the mornin'," he declared, and 
when he discovered that the old dwelling interested 
me, he showed me all over it. 

" If I veesited America," said he, " ye*d shaw me 
all o' your hoose, noo, wouldn't ye ? Well, then. Til 
lat ye see all o' mine." 




Ni 



The Ways of the Farm Folk 6i 

It was an ancient and ill-arranged structure, and 
disorder and bareness reigned undisputed. The lives 
of the inmates seemed wholly given to getting a living, 
and if aught beyond that was gained, it was hoarded. 
I suppose in large part the lacks of the average Scotch 
farmhouse are explained by the fact that it is not owned 
by its farmer occupant. What he himself does to better 
it he counts as thrown away. Improvements are 
begged from the factor, not undertaken independently, 
and the factor apparently is not anxious to do much 
beyond making the place habitable. Between the 
thrifty desire of both tenant and landlord to save, not 
spend, Httle is done to make the home surroundings 
more convenient or to improve the house and add to 
the indoor comforts and amenities. Cottage kitchens 
often had some brightness, but in the farmhouses they 
were apt to be dull working-rooms that to New- World 
eyes were grim and repellent. Indeed, all the rooms 
were devoid of homelikeness, and our cosey American 
sitting-room seemed a thing unknown. 

The farm fields, in pleasant contrast with the houses, 
were free from weeds and under the most perfect cul- 
tivation. The furrows turned by the ploughman were 
absolutely straight, and the rows of tatties and neeps 
could hardly have been more regular. These clean 
fields and the care bestowed on them would have been 
an object-lesson to the average Yankee farmer. 



62 The Land of Heather 

Hillocks was very proud of his housekeeper, and 
frequently, when I called, he had her wrap up several 
of her scones in a newspaper for me to take along to 
my boarding-place. He was convinced that she had 
no equal in all the region. " I was yon at the inn ane 
day to pay ma rent," said he, " and there was twenty 
and fower men there besides, and I thraws a five pun 
note onto the tawble, and I says, ' Fll aye wager ony 
mon here that I hae the best hoosekeeper i' the coon- 
try roond' — I did that! and they daurna ony mon 
tak' me oop." 

He had another lass on the farm who was a good 
housekeeper too ; but she was cross-eyed, " ane e*e 
glowerin' up the lum (chimney), the ither i' the kail- 
pot " ; and he was particular about his victuals, and 
did not feel sure that a person who saw so crooked 
would not get them mixed. So he kept her at 
field tasks usually. Still, she took the place of the 
housekeeper now and then, because the latter objected 
to being indoors all the time, and wanted to work in 
the open air for a change. There were women laborers 
on every farm in the district, some old, some young, 
and they did all sorts of work, except the very heaviest. 
The wage of a woman working by the day was ordi- 
narily fifteen pence. A young girl, however, who hired 
out on a farm by the year would live at the farm- 
house and receive six pounds for her first year's work, 



The Ways of the Farm Folk 6^ 

about ten for the second, and possibly fifteen the third 
year. 

Besides the girls living on the farm, Hillocks for a 
part of the time had several feminine day-workers. 1 
went with him on one occasion to visit a many-acred 
potato field where four such helpers were hoeing. 
Two of them were, married women from the clachan ; 
yet the fact they had homes and husbands to care for 
did not prevent their hiring out to the farmers when 
opportunity offered. With their wide straw hats, light 
aprons, and long-handled hoes the squad in the potato 
field looked very picturesque, and even attractive ; for 
their attire had a neatness and freshness scarcely to be 
expected under the circumstances, and three of them 
had nosegays pinned to their gowns. Their tongues 
were running on with great animation, but they kept 
steadily at work just the same. 

In my calls on Hillocks the old farmer never failed 
to emphasize his hospitality by offering to treat me, 
and the first time he was very insistent it should be 
whiskey. But I had been forewarned. " Aye, he'll be 
gaein' you a dram," the shoemaker's wife had said. 
"He pretends to hae vera guid whuskey. ' Tak it 
oop,' he says, Mt'll no hurt ye. It'll gae doon tae 
your vera taes.' Oh, aye, ye'll be haein' a nip o' ' the 
auld kirk* if ye gae tae Hillocks. Ye canna reseest 
him!"* 



64 The Land of Heather 

When Hillocks found there was no stirring me out 
of my prejudices, he ordered the housekeeper to bring 
in milk, of which he was hardly less proud than of his 
whiskey. Like all the milk produced in the region, it 
was uncommonly rich and sweet. He accounted for 
its virtues by saying they were due to the " yarbs " the 
" coos " browsed on in the dens. He thought those 
luxuriant ravines were peculiar to the district, and, in cow 
pasturage, he doubted if any other portion of the earth 
was favored to a like degree. Hillocks himself chose 
to drink my health in the liquor to which he was used, 
and from a cupboard he brought forth a decanter and 
a wine-glass. He filled the glass, then raised it aloft 
and prefaced the draught with a stiff little speech full 
of good wishes. 

His decanter contained "Irish whuskey," he told 
me. " Ah, but there's a difference in drinks," he con- 
tinued. "I was ance in Glesca, and the whuskey there 
was juist poison. Twa-thirds o' it was water, and the 
lave was some stuff — you couldna tell what — that they 
had put in't. I bought a glass o' it, and aifter ane taste 
threw it unner the tawble. 'Twasna fit to drink. 
But the Irish whuskey — it is graund, mon ! There 
was ane evening the doctor doon below invited me in 
to hae a taste, and he set oot some Irish whuskey, and 
we drank five or sax roonds. It was graund ! The 
doctor couldna walk steady to the door aifter it, but 



r 



I 




The Ways of the Farm Folk 65 

I gaed awa' hame wi' nae mair tribble than if I had 
ta'en water." 

This affection for the social glass was nothing ex- 
ceptional. The Scotch as a people are hard drinkers, 
and their favorite liquor, whiskey, is kept in nearly all 
the homes for occasional family drams and for treat- 
ing friends who chance to call. The conviction is 
growing, however, that it is the curse of the country ; 
and drinking and drunkenness, which were once ac- 
cepted as a matter of course, if not as an actual glory, 
are falling more and more into disrepute. 

My host, at the close of his reminiscence showing his 
prowess as a consumer of Irish whiskey, got out his 
snuff-box, and with the little ivory spoon that was in- 
side administered a good sniff to each nostril. The 
snuff-taking habit was not at all general among the 
women or the younger men ; but the pungent dust 
was held to be one of the necessities by men who were 
middle-aged or elderly. When two such met, their 
cordiality was pretty sure to be accentuated by one or 
the other getting out his snuff-box, and each taking a 
companionable pinch. In case the box was offered 
to a non-snuff-taker, he was considered satisfactorily 
polite if he simply passed it under his nose. 

Many visitors came to Drumtochty, drawn by the 
fame that had been given it by Ian Maclaren, and 
among them were a number from across the ocean. 



66 The Land of Heather 

"It's unearthly — a' thae Americans comin' here," 
was the comment of one of the older village folk ; for 
this interest shown by the outside world was to the 
average inhabitant something past understanding. The 
most notable of the visitors, while I was there, was a 
public reader, a woman, who made a specialty of Scotch 
stories. She gave a reading from Maclaren in the 
schoolhouse before she left, and the audience, which 
was entirely unused to exhibitions of the sort, was very 
much impressed. Hillocks, who had a front seat, was 
entirely overcome by the dramatic impersonations, and 
declared afterwards that he did not suppose there was 
such a thing in the world. 

The next day, at the request of the reader, I took 
her and her father, who was travelling with her, to call 
on Hillocks. The old farmer considered this a great 
honor, and hastened to ask us what we would " take." 

"Ye wull surely taste wi' me," he said. " Ye're no 
2L teetot'lars! Ah-ha ! Weel, noo, I neever jined the 
teetot'lars maseF, but I dinna drink, nevertheless. I 
juist tak' a bit noo and then wi' a neebor, to be social 
and friendly lak. Wuirye hae a glass wi' me? A 
bit whuskey 'ill no hurt a mon." 

Later in our call he took hold of the reader's sleeve 
and remarked : " That's a fine goon, wuman. It maun 
hae cost a gude bit o' siller. But it's warum, too, aye, 
gey warum, and it's saft lak unner the feengers." 



The Ways of the Farm Folk 67 

He mourned some over the contrast between him- 
self and his visitors. " You can traivel a' aroon' the 
warld juist as you please/' said he, " while I maun 
work on because 1 canna afford to stop." Yet he was 
worth forty or fifty thousand dollars. 

I have said that in the matter of cleanliness the 
farmhouses of the region impressed me unfavorably, 
but there were exceptions. For instance, at Drum- 
achar the dwelling was quite irreproachable. The 
scullery and the milkhouse had floors of asphalt and 
walls of whitewashed plaster, and there was no sign 
of dirt anywhere indoors. Outside, however, was the 
coal-heap close under the kitchen windows, and a great 
flock of hens, ducks, and turkeys made themselves at 
home in the neighborhood of the back door. On the 
day I was at Drumachar noon came just as I was leav- 
ing the house, and I met at the door two young 
women, the farmer's daughters, in wide, scoop- 
brimmed hats, coming in from hoeing. The lassies 
looked neat and attractive, their cheeks were rosy, and 
they seemed perfectly healthy and contented. Every 
year in haying time the older girl made all the stacks 
— no small task, for the farm was the largest in the 
district. Fifty cows were kept on it and the milk was 
sent off daily to Dundee. 

Haying begins at Drumtochty the last of June. 
Mowing-machines are in common use, though scythes 



68 The Land of Heather 

are by no means things of the past. Turning is 
done by hand, but every farmer has a horse-rake. 
The weather is so incHned to be dull and showery 
that it is difficult to cure the grass in a reasonable 
length of time, and it is therefore raked up while still 
rather green, and piled in cone-shaped stacks, each con- 
taining about a fair-sized load. The hay is left stacked 
in the field where it grew for several weeks until 
thoroughly dry, when it is loaded on carts and conveyed 
to the stackyard near the farmhouse. One mowing 
suffices, and in the fall the land is let for the winter 
grazing of the sheep from the moors. 

The horse-rake employed in gathering the hay into 
windrows is a heavy iron affair, that looks as if it was 
meant for a harrow. A man walks along behind to 
manage it and drive the horse. A very different type 
of rake is used to bring the hay from the windrows to 
the stacks. It is a many-toothed wooden contrivance, 
Hke a double-edged comb. It slides along flat on the 
ground, and the horse is hitched a considerable distance 
in front, to allow as large a mass of hay as possible to 
gather on the teeth. When it is to be dumped, the 
man stepping along in its wake lifts the handles enough 
to make the teeth catch in the ground and force it to 
flop over. At Drumachar the younger sister rode the 
horse, sitting astride on a blanket. 

In the centre of each haystack is a rough, wooden 



The Ways of the Farm Folk 69 

tripod eight or ten feet high, to serve as a support, 
and to help in ventilation. The person on the stack 
tramps the hay and places it as it is thrown up from 
below till it is piled well above the top of the wooden 
tripod. Special care is taken to arrange the final fork- 
fuls so that they shall form a cap and shed the rain. 
That the top may not blow off, two ropes are adjusted 
over the stack. The ends dangle down the sides, and a 
man below weights them with stones. Then a ladder is 
set against the stack, and the worker up aloft descends. 

The women do their full share of the haymaking, 
and their presence gives the mowing lots an air 
peculiarly domestic and social. I noticed at Drum- 
achar that not only the farmer's daughters and several 
hired female helpers engaged in the work, but if callers 
came, whether men or women, they too went to the 
hayfield, and while they visited, partook in the labor, 
in spite of their best clothes. The children were 
there also, and the scene was a very pleasant and busy 
one. 

What the everyday work of a Scotch farm is I can 
perhaps best make clear by describing it as it was at 
Hillocks, for it was there I became most familiar with 
its routine. Of course, allowance must be made for 
variations in details. Hillocks himself is out in the 
fields in summer at half-past four. But previous to 
leaving the house he rouses the rest of the farm family 



70 The Land of Heather 

and does some of the preliminary kitchen work. First 
he attends to the fire, which, thanks to his mania for 
economy, still has a dim bit of life in it lingering from 
the day before. Each night, to save the expense of 
the match it would be necessary to use in rehghting 
his fire if it went out, he covers the coals with clods 
— peelings of mossy turf from the moor. These 
peelings are chiefly used to cover the potatoes when 
they are piled up in the fields for winter storage, but 
Hillocks makes them do double service. 

After he has replenished the fire. Hillocks hangs 
the porridge pot on the sway, with enough oatmeal in 
it for the household breakfast, and he sets a mess of 
milk heating for the calves. The farm help are sup- 
posed to be up and starting work at five, but, like a 
great many folk in other parts of the world, they feel 
their sleepiest at getting-up time, and their response 
to the master's summons is not as ready as it might 
be. Most likely they nap until he comes in from his 
field work and calls again. The farmer begins to be 
disturbed now, and he cries up the stairway that the 
clock has struck five, "and the naxt one it'll chop'll 
be sax ! " or he informs them, " the sun's gaein' wast, 
and the pay's rinnin' on." 

The girls exasperate him by their dilatoriness in 
dressing, and to them he calls out, " It'll tak' ye five 
minutes to pit in every pin ! " 



The Ways of the Farm Folk 71 

Judging from the usual looks of their clothing, pins 
were the chief fastenings, and I suppose a secure adjust- 
ment consumed of necessity a good deal of time. The 
men, when they rise, go to the barn and take care 
of the horses, and the three lassies milk the cows and 
feed the calves and pigs. Toward seven, the breakfast 
hour, the men come in and wash. None of them use 
soap ; neither do the lassies. It is a luxury of which 
Hillocks does not approve ; and when one of his hired 
girls exchanged some farm produce with a pedler, for 
a cake of the toilet variety, he was very much shocked. 
She put it in a convenient place for family use ; 
but Hillocks would not allow such extravagance. 
" Washin' hands with soap ! '' he exclaimed ; " ye're 
enough to ruin ten men ! " 

The girl with longings for soap had a weakness for 
the esthetic in other directions also, and one day 
created a similar storm by whitening the ash-hole, and 
going over the hearthstone with blue chalk. These 
things are quite customary among such Scotch house- 
wives as take pains to beautify their kitchens, but to 
Hillocks it seemed a waste of valuable time and 
energy. " I've lived seventy and twa years i* the 
world, and never seen the ash-hole whitened afore," was 
his disapproving comment. 

The farm breakfast consists of porridge, milk, and a 
cup of tea. The girls gather at a table on one side of 



72 



The Land of Heather 



the room, and the men at a table opposite. As the^i 
sit down, Hillocks is wont to say, boastfully, " I had 
a drill (row) hoed afore ony o' ye came oot ; " or if it is 
not the hoeing season, he mentions some other task 
he has accomplished while they were drowsing. 

From breakfast till noon all the farm hands, with 
the exception of the housekeeper, are working in the 
fields. At " twal " they come in to eat dinner. The 
bill of fare is broth made of kail, carrots, pease, and 
cabbage, followed by meat and potatoes ; and occasion- 
ally there is a dessert of rhubarb, stewed with milk. 
After the men go out, the women may make a cup of 
tea on the sly ; but they all scurry out of sight if Hil- 
locks appears in the midst of this clandestine indul- 
gence, for he " doesna alloo much tea." 

Just before dinner the lassies had driven in the 
cows, and now they resort to the byres and milk them, 
and then turn them out to pasture again. The men 
care for the horses, and sit about smoking and talk- 
ing till two, when they are due in the fields. At half- 
past six they break off work, put up their horses, and 
are free to do what they please. The supper at seven 
is of tea and jam, with meat food in the form of ham, 
stewed rabbit, or eggs. Bread, scones, and oat cakes 
are on the table at every meal. Between eight and 
nine the women milk for the third time, and their 
work is not often done till toward ten. 



The Ways of the Farm Folk 73 

Hens and ducks were plenty at Hillocks, but they 
were never served on the family table. They went to 
market instead, and were turned into " siller." The 
hens were the care of the housekeeper. They roosted 
on some poles under the eaves, in an old cow byre. 
They laid all around the buildings, sometimes in the 
corn, or under a hedge, and there was one biddy that 
walked up the back stairs every day, and laid an egg in 
the ploughman's bed. 

The farmers hire their help by the year, and the 
year ends at Martinmas, the 28th of November. 
There are two hiring days, the first known as " Little 
Dunning Market," and the second as " FHt Friday." 
The former, which is by far the more important, is 
the great holiday of the year to the farm help. It 
comes on the third Friday of October, and they all go 
to Perth and stand along the chief street, and bargain 
with the farmers who come among them to hire. 

" Are ye gaein' tae fee thae day ? " asks the farmer. 

If the reply is affirmative, and they can settle on a 
satisfactory wage, the farmer gives the man a shilling 
to bind the bargain, and each takes the other's address. 
So great is the crowd on the street that " it seems a 
won'er the women and bairns do not get crushed." 

It is not a quiet crowd. The ploughmen are there 
for a holiday, and they are bound to celebrate, and 
"An awfu' lot o' them gets drunk — women tae." 



74 The Land of Heather 

" Every Jockie has his Jeannie," and the men are 
giving all the girls they know fairings — that is, they 
treat them to sweeties (candy), fruits, and drink, and 
buy them ribbons, gloves, and other little things. For 
themselves the ploughmen invest in "great muckle 
paper roses," half a dozen on a branch, and this 
branch they stick in their hats. The hilarity waxes 
higher as the day advances, and men are seen parad- 
ing around with their arms about their sweethearts' 
necks, and in the demonstrative sociability the women's 
bonnets are half torn off their heads, though the wearers 
are quite oblivious of the fact. But the day at length 
comes to an end, and the farm help scatters out into 
the country, and the next morning those who have 
recovered from the effects of their holiday are at work 
in their old places. 

There they continue until Martinmas Day, the time 
appointed for " flitting " to their new masters. Flit 
Friday is the Friday after Martinmas. It is a mild 
repetition of Little Dunning Market, and exists for 
those who failed to fee on the earlier occasion. Such 
go then to Perth, and stand for hire on the chief street, 
and bargain for places just as the others did a few weeks 
before. 

Aside from these days that were peculiarly the plough- 
man's, there were various others sprinkled through the 
year that had more or less of a hoHday flavor to the 



The Ways of the Farm Folk 75 

people of Drumtochty. To begin with, there was 
the " First Footin '* that ushered in the new year. 
The young men did not go to bed on New Year's 
Eve, and at twelve o'clock they rang the Free Kirk 
bell, and started out for a tour of the village. As 
they went they made all the noise they could, shout- 
ing and singing, beating drums and playing on " melo- 
jeons " (accordions). They knocked on the doors and 
bade the house dwellers get up and let them in. Not 
so many respond to these summons as in former days ; 
but where entrance is gained, the first man who crosses 
the threshold treats the family to whiskey, and the 
midnight callers all expect to be treated in return. 
The idea is that the " first foot " in a house on the 
New Year brings it good luck, provided there is an 
accompaniment of mutual treating. 

But " First Footin " is only an incident at most, 
and the New Year's observance of Hansel Monday 
is of much more consequence. This is the first 
Monday of January, and translated into plain English 
it means "Present" or "Token" Monday. Bits of 
money, or small articles bought for the purpose, are 
given to the children, while good feeling among their 
elders is promoted by neighborly visits, in which they 
lunch and drink a friendly glass together. In old 
times it was the fashion with the arrival of each caller 
to get out a great kebbock (cheese) and hand it to 



76 The Land of Heather 

the visitor, who put it on his knee and cut off what 
he wanted to eat. Now, all callers are treated to 
short-bread, and every housekeeper lays in a goodly 
supply of it the week preceding. Probably no one 
anticipates Hansel Monday with more pleasure than 
the lass who delivers the mail ; for her faithful services 
during the year are then remembered by the bestowal 
of many little presents of money, when she makes her 
rounds. In the evening there is generally a dancing 
party in the schoolhouse, with a fiddler to furnish 
music, and the merriment continues till daylight. 

The next notable day is one appointed in February 
for a ploughing match. At eight o'clock on the day 
selected, sixteen ploughs are ready for the contest in 
a big field on one of the large farms. No end of men 
are present from all the country around to look on 
and to partake of the refreshments, both solid and 
fluid, furnished the crowd by the farmer on whose 
land the match takes place. Each team is to plough 
a half acre, and the work continues well into the after- 
noon. At the close of the contest the judges make 
the awards and distribute the prizes. One prize is 
for the man who finishes first, another for the one with 
the best horses, another for the oldest, and one for 
the youngest ploughman, one for the tidiest dressed 
ploughman, one for the ploughman with the largest 
family, etc. If a man did not excel in one way he was 



The Ways of the Farm Folk 77 

likely to in another, and the list of prizes was long 
enough, so that every man had a fair chance to get 
something. 

On April first the children celebrate in much the 
same way they do in our country. They fool each 
other and their elders, pin bits of paper on coats, and 
send the unwary on errands that are invented for the 
day. The errand trick is the one on which they most 
pride themselves, and it is that gives the day its Scotch 
title of " Gowk's Errant Day." 

" Fastern's E'en,*' too, is the occasion of considerable 
curious celebrating in Drumtochty. I was a good deal 
puzzled to know what the term meant, for all that the 
villagers could tell me was simply that it was usually in 
February. First came Candlemas, and then you waited 
till you had a new moon, and the night of the next 
" Chuesday " after that was " Eastern's E'en." Finally 
I asked the Free Kirk minister, and he said it was the 
evening before Lent, an evening which in some coun- 
tries would be celebrated as the climax of the carnival 
time preceding the Lenten quiet. It was a strange 
echo of these revels that had found its way to the 
Scotch upland. Some one in the village would make 
up a lot of small "treacle scones," and invite all the 
" young folks " to come in for the evening. By young 
folks was not meant just the unmarried lads and lassies. 
" Oh, we wouldna like it," said the shoemaker's wife, 



7 8 The Land of Heather 

" no to gae after we marry. The young fowk are ony 
frae twal to fifty, married or unmarried. I hae seen a 
gude hooseful whiles i' this kitchen on Fastern's E'en. 
Soom sit on the chairs, soom on the bed and the 
table — oh, onywhere ! The scones wad hae things 
stirred in wi' the batter, but ye couldna tell what you 
might get. We wad aye feel the scone wi' our feengers 
afore we ate it. Soomtimes there wad be ane thing in 
it, soomtimes twa, or it might be none at a'. If you 
found a reeng, you wad be the first to marry ; or a but- 
ton, you wad marry a tailor ; or a thimmel, wad sew for 
a leevin'; or a threpenny bit, wad marry a reech mon. 
Then by and by, aifter the fun is ower, each lad wad 
be huntin' a lass an' speirin' wad she gae hame wi' 
him. ' Are ye ready to gae hame noo ? ' he wad say ; 
and if she said, 'No, I am no ready,' he wad ken he 
couldna hae her, and then he wad speir soom ither lass, 
and aifter the lassies were a' seen hame the lads might 
pu' the kail stalks up in our gardens, or tie sticks 
across our doors so we couldna get oot naxt mornin'. 
Aye, it wad fair scunner ye, soom o' the things the 
laddies dae on Fastern's E'en." 

In September a "flower show" is held in the school- 
house, to which resort the people from all the region. 
They bring for exhibition flowers, both cut and in 
pots ; garden vegetables, fruits, honey, butter, cheese ; 
and the cooks each contribute samples of their culi- 



The Ways of the Farm Folk 79 

nary art in the shape of a certain number of scones and 
oat cakes and six boiled potatoes. A small charge is 
made for admission, a " sheddle" (schedule or catalogue) 
is printed, and various prizes are given. 

Later in the fall the young folks find pleasure in the 
dusk of the chilly evenings gathering the hedge cut- 
tings and rubbish into piles and making great shanacles 
(bonfires). Still later comes Hallowe'en with its " apple 
dookinV' burning of nuts, and other sports, and then 
there is a blank until Christmas. On that day, in the 
homes where there are young children, they " do up 
the hoose wi' greens," which means that the kitchen is 
trimmed with box, fir, ivy, and holly ; and a final touch 
is furnished by a sprig of mistletoe, which is hung over 
the kitchen door to give the inmates the liberty to 
kiss whoever comes in. It is mainly the young people 
who do the kissing. If a man whose youth is past 
takes advantage of the mistletoe, the others deride him 
and say: " YouVe no need to be rinnin* aifter the 
lassies. You're up on the shelf a'ready." Inexpensive 
presents are given to the bairns at home and to some 
of their small relatives who live near by. The grown- 
up folk take no notice of the day for themselves, 
except that the wife invites in several friends to an 
extra good dinner at seven after " he," as the wife calls 
the husband, has finished work. Plum pudding and 
tea cakes are the special features of this repast. 



8o The Land of Heather 

The year ends with " Hogmanay Night." " Hog- 
manay " is an ancient term of uncertain meaning, 
though some suppose its equivalent to be the hearty 
old-time greeting, " God be with you." On this last 
night of the year it is the custom of the children to go 
" guysin'." They start out, half a dozen or so in a 
company, just after they have eaten their supper, at 
about six o'clock. " Soom blacks their faces wi' soot," 
explained my landlady, " wi' perhaps a spot here and 
there o' whitening. Ithers hae false faces on. They 
wear auld coats, and tie their trousers up wi* strae. I 
gey often dress Jimmie as a wuman. I hae seen them 
no kennin' him at a\ Soom wull hae penny whustles, 
and they carry long sticks to pound wi' when they 
dance. They gae a' through the clachan to every 
hoose, and then to the farmhooses not too far awa'. 
They gae in wi' no muckle knockin', an' the fowk say, 
' Why div ye no begin to sing and dance ? ' One o' 
their songs is this — 

** * Get up, auld wife, and shake your feathers. 
And dinna think that we are beggars. 
We're juist a wheen bairns come oot tae play ; 
Rise up and gie us oor Hogmanay.' 

Before they go, the fowk treats them to oranges, short- 
bread, or cake, and gies them usually a penny apiece. 
They wullna get hame till ten or eleven o'clock, and 
soomtimes Jimmie hae near twa shillings." 



The Ways of the Farm Folk 8i 

The grown people, too, go guysing occasionally. 
In that case two men dress up in women's clothes, 
and two women put on men's garments, and a third 
man goes along and plays an accordion. But such 
parties are only intent on having a lark, and do not 
make the extended tours the children do. They go 
simply to a few houses of their special friends and 
dance and perform, and with their masks and costumes 
try to mystify those on whom they call, as to who they 
really are. 

Perhaps I should include among the holidays the 
two fast days of the year, but there is nothing recreative 
about them. One comes in June and the other in 
December, and they are kept much like the Sabbath, 
with cessation of work and long services in the 
churches that are very generally attended. 

Of a character that has much more of the holiday 
air, are some of the customs connected with the wed- 
dings. The evening of the day preceding that set 
for the ceremony is one looked forward to with dread 
by the prospective bride, for that is the " footwashing " 
evening. A crowd of young people call at the bride's 
home, but she, often half distracted, has gone into hid- 
ing. The visitors search high and low, and never give 
up till they are successful. " I hae seen them," said 
the shoemaker's wife, " rinnin' a' through the toon 
aifter her. There was ane lass lived naxt door, and 



82 The Land of Heather 

she came Into oor hoose and went through the scullery 
and oot at the back window whiles the crowd was wait- 
ing at the door. But they juist saw her heels gaein' 
wast the road, and were aifter her ; and she went doon 
the lane and in at Jean Robinson's, and Kid in her gar- 
ret ; and when the crowd came, Jean tried to persuade 
them she wasna there, but they wouldna be per- 
suaded. There were a guid mony, and Jean cried, 
' For God's sake, dinna gae up my garret ! If ye a' 
gae up, ye'll come doon through.' 

" But they got the lass and took her hame. Then 
she was set in a chair, and her shoes and stockings 
pulled aff, and they wad rub their hands up the lum 
in the soot and then rub them on her feet, and 
use brushes, too, till her feet wad be juist shinin'. 
Whuskey was generally gaein' at the feetwashing, and 
soom o' the men wad be very rough. Clothes wad 
get dirty, and soomtimes torn, and if you wore your 
best claes, so much the waur for you. I ken that ance 
Sandy Duncan came in unawares, late, and he had on 
his white cuffs, and they got a baud o' him wi' their 
soot, and he was a sight to behold. 

" They use soap and cloths and brushes a', in the 
washin', and the flure wad be juist saiHn' wi' water. 
Then at the end they'd hae a dance. We'd hae nae 
music, but we'd sing to dance by — nae words, only 
diddHn (humming). When we'd get gaein', we'd a' 



The Ways of the Farm Folk 83. 

diddle thegither, soom o* us on ane tune and soom on 
anither ; and aifter that the lads wad very likely carry 
the bridegroom afF on their shoulders to the public and 
make him stand treat a' aroond." 

On the evening of the wedding a sharp watch is 
kept that the bridegroom may be seen on his way to 
the home of the bride, and if the night is rainy, it is 
thought to be a clever pleasantry to pelt him with flour. 
Wet or dry, many friendly shoes are thrown at him, 
though the friendliness is not so apparent if the aim 
proves true. One woman told me that on an evening 
when she was to act as bridesmaid, she accompanied 
the groom from the clachan to his intended's home on 
a neighboring farm, " and I walkit juist a wee buttie 
along," said she, "gaein' east on his arm, when soom 
ane threw a shoe, and it hit him side o' the heid and cut 
his face, and the blood poored doon, and I thought he 
was killed." 

If the bride*s home was sufficiently distant, so that 
the bridal attendants rode to it in a brake, every one 
threw shoes and rice at the occupants of the vehicle 
as they were leaving the village. " I mind," said the 
bridesmaid before quoted, " I threw my mither's slip- 
pers ance, when I hadna time to find ony auld shoon, 
and they gaed into the machine (wagon) and I never 
saw them again." 

The guests gather at the bride's in the best room. 



84 The Land of Heather 

Just before the ceremony the bridegroom goes in, and 
there he is " talkin* awa' " when the bride enters a little 
later on her father's arm, preceded by her bridesmaids. 
The young couple now take their places before a win- 
dow, and the minister reads the service. The minister's 
remuneration consists of a pair of gloves and a silk 
handkerchief supplied by the groom, who also is ex- 
pected to give his best man, shortly before the wedding, 
a white shirt and collar and tie. The couple themselves 
have a variety of presents, including lamps, silverware, 
and other household furnishings, and a Bible, which is 
the regulation gift from the minister. These things 
are shown to calling friends on the two or three days 
that antedate the wedding, but are not exhibited the 
evening of the ceremony. 

On a table in the room where the wedding takes 
place is the bride's loaf, frosted and fancy and, not 
unfrequently, three stories high. Near by are wine and 
wine glasses. As soon as the ceremony is over the 
bride cuts the loaf and the bridesmaids pass it about 
among the guests. At the same time the wine is 
poured and healths are drank. Then the company 
adjourns to an upstairs room and sits down to supper. 
This room has been cleared of its ordinary furniture, 
and two long tables improvised with boards give it 
the air of a dining hall. Dishes have been borrowed 
from the neighbors, and the girl friends of the bride 



The Ways of the Farm Folk 



85 



have helped prepare the feast, and are present to wait 
on the tables. Roast beef, boiled ham, fowl, pastry, 
beer, and bottled lemonade are the chief items in the 
bill of fare. 

The minister leaves at the conclusion of the supper, 
much to the relief of the company, whose spirits are 
not a little repressed in his presence. They now go 
downstairs, and the old people sit and talk in the best 
room, while the young folks dance in the kitchen. 
The scraping of the fiddle and the clatter of feet, with 
pauses now and then for some one to sing a song, go 
on till midnight. Then there is an intermission, and 
tea and cakes are passed around, and such as choose 
take a drop of whiskey. At one dancing is resumed, 
and it is two or three hours later when the wedding 
party breaks up. 




A Hayrake 



IV 



AN EXCURSION 




Carrying Peat out of the Bog 



FOR the most part 
my stay in Drum- 
tochty was unin- 
terrupted by any trips 
that took me farther from 
the village than I could 
conveniently walk. The 
only jaunts of a more 
extended character were 
several visits to Perth 
and a three days' drive 
up into the Highlands. 
I hired a gray pony and 
a yellow dogcart from a 
farmer for this Highland 
journey, and started at 



eight o'clock on a Monday morning, feeling a good 
deal elated that the conveyance was in my sole posses- 
sion without a driver to consider and to provide for. 
The cart, like nearly all British vehicles, was very 

86 



An Excursion 87 

high and heavy, and the wheels were typically British 
in their breadth of tires and general solidity. 

I was only troubled by two things — firstly, because 
I had failed to ask before starting what the Scotch said 
to their horses when they wanted them to stop or go 
on ; secondly, because I was fearful that when I met a 
team I would bring on a collision by forgetting it was 
the custom in Britain to turn to the left, instead of 
to the right as with us. But the horse seemed to 
understand the intent of my commands, even if they 
were in words foreign to it, and the teams I met were 
so few and far between that my anxiety on their 
account was mainly wasted. I carried a pock (bag) 
full of grain for the horse, and a box full of provisions 
for myself Noons I stopped for lunch by some road- 
side burn, whenever and wherever I took the fancy, 
and, after I had set the horse feeding, would get out 
my lunch box and find some convenient boulder for a 
seat, and dine in true gypsy fashion. 

The earlier part of my journey was for many miles up 
the wide, pleasant valley of the Tochty, but at length 
I entered a crooked mountain canon. Glen Urtach by 
name, overshadowed by great craggy ridges on whose 
gentler declivities the brown heather clung. These 
mountains looked as if thunderbolts and tornadoes 
had made them their playground ; for their sides were 
everywhere furrowed with deep jagged ravines, and 



88 The Land of Heather 

their lower slopes were strewn with masses of loose 
rocks hurled down from above by the sudden storm 
floods. The natural wildness of the scene was further 
emphasized by the fact that the glen in all its extent 
of three or four miles contained but two houses, and 
these were nothing but lonely little cottages occupied 
by shepherds whose business it was to care for the 
moorland sheep. 

Near the entrance to the glen were the grassy em- 
bankments of a Roman camp, but a feature of the 
valley that interested me more than this relic of the 
dim past was a great boulder about a mile beyond. 
It stood a little aside from the highway, and a much- 
used path leading to it was evidence that it had many 
visitors. What the attraction was, I could not have 
conjectured, had I not heard its story previously. It 
had a smooth, rounding top, and rose above the 
ground to a height of seven or eight feet. At its 
base lay three heavy stones, the largest about the size 
of a peck measure. It was a common custom among 
travellers who happened into Glen Urtach to try 
"saddling the mare" — that is, to attempt putting 
the stones up on the boulder. They slid off with 
surprising ease, and few persons had the strength or 
cleverness to lodge all three. Still, it was allowable 
to boast, even if you only succeeded with the two 
smaller ones. That the sport was a popular one 



An Excursion 89 

was attested by the battered whiteness of the top of 
the boulder. 

Beyond Glen Urtach, I almost at once entered a 
second glen, the name of which I can spell a good deal 
better than I can pronounce it — Q-u-a-i-c-h. The 
valley here was not confined by mountains, as had been 
that I left behind, and though there were steep, rocky 
hills looking down at some remove, the near landscape 
was one of wide lowlands, girt about with gentle slopes 
of heathery moor. Presently I approached a small 
lake, and by its shore came on a strange little village 
— a huddled, irregular group of possibly twoscore 
dwellings. But many of these were roofless, and 
others had only remnants of roofs — a few gaunt tim- 
bers, it might be, with sometimes a bit of old thatch 
clinging to them. Not more than a half-dozen of the 
houses were still lived in, and they too were partakers 
in the general ruin, and were patched and dishevelled 
to the last degree. Their roofs were of leaky thatch, 
with turf laid on thickly along the gable ends and 
ridgepoles, and the shaky walls were propped with fre- 
quent posts. Yet certain of the house fronts had 
redeeming touches in the form of flowering vines 
growing about the low doorways, and there was one, 
where the doorstone had been gone over recently with 
the tint of sky-blue chalk that is esteemed so attractive 
for the threshold among Scotch cottage-dwellers. 



90 



The Land of Heather 



On the grass, near one of the houses, lay an old 
man taking care of a baby, and talking with a rosy- 
cheeked young woman who was standing in a neigh- 
boring doorway. I had hitched my horse and had 
been walking through the village, but now I stopped 
to converse with this group, and before I left was in- 
vited to step inside the dwelling. It had no second 
story, nor even a " loft," and the living rooms were 
only two, unless a third apartment, reserved for the 
cow, is counted. To keep the warmth from escaping, 
the low-raftered kitchen ceiling was pasted all over 
with many thicknesses of newspapers. Underfoot was 
a paving of great flat stones, with wide cracks and 
uncertain hollows between. In a pocket of the wall 
was a bunch of a bed, and conspicuous among the 
other scanty furnishings was a rack of crockery, with 
the kist (chest) containing the family supply of oat- 
meal beneath it. At one side of the room was a fire- 
place made of heavy stones, piled up so as to leave a 
depression in their midst, and the smoke went up a rude 
chimney of clay-daubed slabs hooding out from the wall. 
The wide chimney orifice began about four feet above 
the hearth, and when I put my head under and looked 
upward, I could see a bit of sky through the haze of 
smoke. That the wind and rain must have driven 
down freely at times was very apparent. 

The village had once been prosperous and full of 



An Excursion 91 

inhabitants, but the little farms of the old crofters were 
now a part of one large farm, or were growing up to 
heather. I was informed that the titled owner of the 
glen chose to "kill off" the villagers, in order to raise 
grouse. No doubt the fewer people and the less land 
under cultivation, the greater the area of moor, and the 
natural sequence would be more game and more pleas- 
ure for the aristocracy in their hunting ; but my sym- 
pathies were with the crofters, and I found the village 
in its lonesome decay very melancholy. 

I had been warned that the road up Glen Quaich 
was a " rough " one, and I resumed my journey with 
anticipations of discomfort. However, " rough " ap- 
plied to a road means a good deal in an American's 
vocabulary, and it was an agreeable surprise to find 
that nowhere was the glen road otherwise than hard 
and smooth. Its only defect was its narrowness. 
Two teams could barely scrape past when they met, 
and usually one of them would draw well out by the 
roadside and stop to give the other as free right of 
way as possible. The road continued the full length 
of the loch, keeping to the levels near the shores. 
Then it turned aside and began a zigzag ascent up the 
steep slopes of a mountain. At length I reached a 
plateau of wild, rolling moorland that had no touch of 
human softening save the light streak of the unfenced 
highway winding through the brown heather. This 



92 The Land of Heather 

road, like that in the valley, was macadamized, and the 
encroaching turf at the sides had recently been spaded 
out. Its tidiness was in curious contrast to the rude- 
ness of the region it traversed. Everything was deso- 
late and sombre — no houses, no trees, not even a 
bush — just great hills and deep valleys shorn down 
to turf and heather. On the hilltops and the steeper 
slopes the rugged rocks broke through. In the hol- 
lows were black bogs and dark pools, and I passed 
an occasional lonely little lake bordered with a rank 
growth of reeds. There were streams a-plenty, but 
they added no touch of brightness. Their pools and 
fretting shallows and foamy tumbles were almost lost 
in the boulders that strewed their courses, and they 
were unshaded and bare to the point of uncanniness. 
The only noticeable flower on the upland was the 
bell heather. It grew in scattered clumps and patches 
amid the common ling heather that would paint the 
hills a month later, but which as yet was only in 
bud. The heather did not cover in one solid mass 
the whole moor. Instead there was a constant inter- 
mitting with irregular areas of turf or rusty earth. 
The explanation was that every spring strips of heather 
were burnt off by the shepherds, an acre or so to a 
strip, to give the grass and the tender, new-starting 
heather a chance to furnish food for the sheep. But 
the fire was not allowed to spread beyond definite 



An Excursion 



93 



limits, for the gentry were very particular that the 
game birds should have plenty of shrubbery in which 
to build their nests. 

As I journeyed through the moorland desolation I 
occasionally roused a peesweep (lapwing) into com- 
plaining crying or started up a family of grouse. All 
along were sheep, in couples and little groups, feeding 
on the thin grasses. They were long-haired sheep 
with black faces and curling horns. Each of the old 
sheep was apt to have a lamb with it and, in case such 
were near the road, the little one at my approach would 
slip around behind its mother and look out at me 
inquiringly from its safe retreat. 

Once I passed a line of game covers — perhaps a 
dozen of them in all — stretching along over the 
moor eight or ten rods apart. Each cover was just 
a bank of sods about four feet wide and four high, 
with a little pile of sods a few paces in the rear for a 
seat. In the season the sportsmen, hidden by the 
covers, shot the birds as fast as the gamekeepers drove 
them up within range, ■'f^^^., ,^.^ ' .r 

The weather was threatening, and the wind blew, 
and I felt the touch now and then of a stray drop of 
rain. I was therefore the more rejoiced when later 
in the day the roadway began perceptibly to descend ; 
for as soon as I reached the lowlands, I was certain 
to find some village and a place to spend the night. 



94 The Land of Heather 

Far on ahead I could see a deep valley, and beyond 
the valley a range of great blue mountains rising up 
and up till their summits were lost in the drifting gray 
cloud mists. The road kept taking steeper dips as 
I went on, and the little horse with the heavy cart 
pushing behind seemed quite disturbed in its mind, 
and dug in its heels, and crept down at a pace that 
would shame a snail. By and by I came to a final 
descent through a wood that was so slippery and so 
nearly perpendicular that I took pity on the horse 
and got out and walked. But no sooner had we 
arrived at the bottom of the hill than we emerged, 
as if by magic, into a neat little hamlet, so hedged 
about on every hand by great trees that it looked as 
if it had been built in a clearing of the primeval 
forest. The dweUings crowded along both sides of 
an oblong open of hard-beaten earth, where a few dis- 
couraged grasses grew. At one end of the broad 
street or common stood an old church, while a quarter 
of a mile distant at the other end was an ivied stone 
archway, with iron gates opening into a great park 
around a castle. The village was Kenmore, at the 
foot of Loch Tay, and the lake was close by, spread- 
ing away to the west in a narrow passage between the 
great hills and mountains that hemmed it in. 

After a night spent at an attractive whitewashed 
hotel fronting on the common, I went on, keeping to 



1^^'" '^^ 


Hj|tt^^^ _«■ 


'^^'-''^'"'''^VHII 


iV 


■■ 


p 




m 


M 


g 


Bc^J^H 


^HF I ^ 


1 


■»1||^^^B 


1 


K V "^ 




i»k 

,"^' r 




1 


■ 






^^^Pa^fy^ 


II 



By the Fireside 



An Excursion 95 

the south side of the loch, and travelling westward. 
It was a doubtful day of mingled sunshine and light 
showers. The mountains round about brightened and 
darkened in a continual change of drifting light and 
shadows. Their higher peaks were always cloud- 
capped, and made one feel as if the occasional showers 
that came misting down their slopes were manufactured 
and sent out from the hidden summits. The lake, 
with its wooded borders and its mountain setting, was 
very beautiful. Along the steep shores I came on 
frequent thatched cottages that were as forlorn and as 
rude in their surroundings as those I had seen the aay 
before in Glen Quaich. Some of the gardens con- 
nected with these cots were on the most precipitous 
slopes imaginable, and as the rows without exception 
ran the steep way of the hill, I thought the owners 
would almost need the aid of a ladder to climb up and 
down them. 

Toward noon I left the lake and took a road that 
slanted up the hills, and a mile or two of climbing 
brought me out on the barren wastes of the heights. 
The moors were of the same deserted brownness as 
those I had crossed the previous day, with the same 
dull reaches of heather, the craggy ridges and un- 
shaded streams, and the scattered groups of sheep. I 
saw many depressions where peat had recently been cut. 
These cuttings were always in marshy hollows, but 



96 The Land of Heather 

the hollows were by no means confined to the valleys. 
Often they were on the highest parts of the moor. 
The peat holes were rarely more than three or four 
feet deep, and except for the dark, ragged banks that 
bordered them, they were hardly noticeable in the 
moorland landscape. All about the cavities the peat 
bricks lay drying. Some of them had evidently only 
been dug out a day or two, and looked like oblongs 
of stiff black mud. They were as full of water as 
a sponge, and would lie spread on the heath for a 
month before they would be sufficiently dry to be 
carted to the farmhouses. 

My day's journey came to an end when, in the late 
afternoon, I reached a village named Amulree. Its 
most conspicuous building was a small church crown- 
ing a bare knoll and having round about a tiny church- 
yard crowded with graves. From here I could see a 
lonely treeless schoolhouse a quarter of a mile out on 
the moor where two roads met. The rest of the vil- 
lage consisted of a small hotel and half a dozen houses 
reposing in a valley where an old stone bridge spanned 
a little river. It seemed about as much lost to the 
world as it well could be ; yet the hotel had many 
visitors in summer, attracted by the fishing that was 
to be had in the stream. Just then the only fisher- 
men lodgers were four cigarette-smoking young men 
with very high white collars, and other things to match. 



An Excursion 



97 



I did not think the fish would suffer much at their 
hands. 

On the borders of Amulree I visited one of the 
rude, thatched farmhouses that were common in the 
region, and which was of especial interest because it 
was a typical, old-fashioned cotter's house. As I 
entered the yard two dogs hanging about the door- 
way barked at me menacingly ; but an old woman 
came out and quieted them, and when I mentioned 
that I was from America, she invited me in, only 
would I wait outside until she could " redd up the 
hoose " ? 

Near the doorway was a tub turned bottom upward, 
and on that I sat down and looked about. The view 
was not very inspiring, for it was mainly comprised in 
a rough, sloping yard, and a group of dismal little 
stone sheds. Several of the sheds were roofless and 
half fallen, and the farm tools got along in corners 
and under the shreds of roof still left, as best they 
could. The house was soon made presentable, and I 
went in. It was a long, low building with three rooms, 
"a but, a ben, and a byre." Translated, that means 
a kitchen, a best room, and a cow stable. The kitchen 
occupied the middle, between the other two apart- 
ments, and was a combination workroom, sitting room, 
bedroom, and pantry. " Ben the hoose " served like- 
wise as a sleeping room, and also as a storeroom and 



98 The Land of Heather 

parlor, while the byre was put to double use as a cow 
stable and henhouse. 

The kitchen had been cleared of the pots and pans 
and odds and ends that had no doubt been lying 
around handy all over the floor previous to my unex- 
pected advent, and in so far was not wholly charac- 
teristic. It was a rickety apartment, much confined 
in both height and breadth, and with no ceiling save 
some boards laid loosely on the beams overhead. 
The crooked timbers of the framework bulged out into 
the room here and there, and the stones of the floor 
were so rough, and had such cracks and crevices be- 
tween, that there was need of practice to keep one's 
balance on them. As for getting chairs or tables to sit 
level on such a floor, that was simply impossible. But 
what seemed to me the least desirable feature of the 
kitchen was its odor, — and no wonder it had an odor, 
for there was the cow stable just beyond a thin, shaky 
partition. On the hearth was a great basket of eggs 
which my hostess would presently carry out to a 
grocer's cart that visited the vicinity once a week, 
selling store wares and picking up small produce in 
exchange. The woman and her brother were the 
only dwellers in the house. They had quite an ex- 
tended farm, chiefly devoted to sheep-raising, and in 
spite of the lack of comforts in the house and the 
dilapidation of the buildings, it would not be sur- 



An Excursion 



99 



prising if these farm folk had a good bit of money 
laid aside. 

This visit to the cotter's house at Amulree was the 
most interesting incident of the latter part of my ex- 
cursion. The experiences of the final day were largely 
a repetition of those already related, and I have only 
to add that my leisurely travelling, with its various 
stops and asides, brought me back to the shoemaker's 
cottage in Drumtochty about sunset. 




"Puttin' oot the Dung." 



HISTORIC GROUND 




Entrance to a Close 



MIDSUMMER 
had come and 
" passed, and 

there were hints of 
autumn in the bare 
mowing-fields, and in 
an occasional chill 
night. The rowan 
trees in the dens were 
beginning to get gay 
with their clusters of 
scarlet berries, the 
moors were taking on 
a pink cast with the 
first opening of the 
heather buds, blue- 
bells nodded by every 
pathside, and the wild 
rosebushes, whose riot- 
ous tangles, when I 



Historic Ground loi 

first came, were profusely adorned with bloom, had 
dropped their petals and were now dotted over with 
green hips. So, too, the hawthorn hedges which had 
been in their fulness of frosty white two months before 
were now loaded with tiny haws. 

It was at this time that I took my final leave of 
Drumtochty, intending to proceed more or less directly 
to Edinburgh. But I was in no haste, and most of 
the first day I spent in getting better acquainted with 
Perth and its vicinity. Like all Scotch towns, Perth 
is very much crowded in its poorer parts, and many 
curious little passageways dive in among the shops 
that front on the chief streets to the huddles of 
dwellings in behind. These passages are miniature 
tunnels, and above each narrow entering arch a name 
is painted — such and such a "close.'* If I went on 
through, I soon came on a small paved open, hedged 
about with old stone houses, though once in a while a 
close took more public character by having in its semi- 
seclusion an inn, or two or three small shops. 

The people swarmed in these humbler neighbor- 
hoods, and slovenly women and dirty, half-clad chil- 
dren were everywhere. Among other street scenes I 
recall a tattered old woman talking with some men 
and smoking a stub of a pipe. She would take out 
the pipe every now and then, and spit on the pave- 
ment just like a veteran male tobacco-user. 



I02 The Land of Heather 

Another picturesque remembrance of the city has 
to do with a park on its borders known as the North 
Inch. This park was a great expanse of grass with a 
few rows of young trees started on it. A number of 
cows were grazing there, and a scattering of strollers 
and bicyclers were on the paths ; but the main feature 
of the path was the clothes-poles that stretched away 
in hundreds for a mile or so. This network of lines 
was hung full of garments, both of white and gayer 
colors, and the grass was spread with quantities more, 
and women with barrows were busy in the midst of 
this mammoth wash, so that taken all together it sug- 
gested, as viewed from afar, some gaudy show in full 
blast. Children were numerous in the neighborhood 
of the clothes, many of them babies in their mother's 
arms or in the care of an older sister. But there were 
plenty of toddlers, too, and others a trifle more mature, 
who gave their energies to racing and romping, turn- 
ing summersaults, and making valorous attempts to 
stand on their heads. 

After a noon lunch I took a tram for Scone Palace. 
This tram was of the usual British type — a clumsy, 
two-story horse-car, plastered all over with a crazy- 
patchwork of advertisements. A narrow, winding stair 
at the rear gave access to the roof, and the novice finds 
the ascent rather awkward, and the downlook from the 
top impresses him with an exaggerated idea of the 



Historic Ground 103 

height, and makes him fear the vehicle may overturn 
from topheaviness. Otherwise the roof is an agreeable 
place in pleasant weather. Scone proved to be less 
than a half-hour*s ride distant. The palace is a gray, 
castlelike mansion, reposing in the retirement of an 
attractive park that extends for several miles along the 
banks of the river Tay. There are many acres of 
close-clipped lawns, and trees of all kinds, scattered 
and in groves, not a few of them so lofty and deep- 
shadowed as to be suggestive of tropical luxuriance. 

I saw the palace, but the flag floating from the lof- 
tiest tower showed that its noble resident was at home, 
and I was only allowed to gaze at a distance. On the 
present palace grounds, not far from the building itself, 
was once a village where now a heavy wood rises. 
The market cross still stands to mark the centre of the 
ancient hamlet, and the people of the region say, 
" Many a village has lost its cross, but only one cross 
has lost its village." The burial-place of this olden- 
time community is just aside from the main avenue to 
the palace, and that tiny plot within his grounds the 
Earl does not own, nor can he shut the public from 
entering his park on their way to it. This is said to 
be a sore trial to the dweller in the palace, and it is 
related that in his younger days he spent ^40,000 in a 
vain attempt to get from the courts the right to close 
this little cemetery. 



I04 The Land of Heather 

The first mention of Scone in history dates back 
eleven centuries, at which time a monastery was built 
there. The most notable treasure that the holy fathers 
of the institution had in their care was the stone on 
which the kings of Scotland were inaugurated. This 
stone is now in Westminster Abbey, immediately be- 
neath the seat of the chair in which the kings of Eng- 
land are crowned. It is a clumsy, oblong block of dull 
reddish sandstone, with a few small imbedded pebbles. 
If its legendary story is to be credited, it was originally 
the pillow of the patriarch Jacob at Luz, when he 
dreamed his dream of the ladder to heaven, on which 
the angels were ascending and descending. Later, 
about the time of Moses, the stone finds its way into 
the hands of one Gathelus, son of an Athenian king. 
This Gathelus became a man of note in Egypt, where 
he entered the service of Pharaoh. He rose rapidly, 
and finally married that ruler's daughter Scota. Gathe- 
lus was on excellent terms with Moses, who, shortly 
before the plagues were visited on the land, gave him 
a friendly hint of what was coming. So impressed was 
Gathelus with the undesirability of experiencing these 
plagues, that he took ship and sailed away to Spain. 
There he acquired a wide kingdom, and there he died. 

The ancient stone which Jacob had used as a pillow 
had always been numbered among the dead monarch's 
most valuable possessions, and he bequeathed it to his 



Historic Ground 105 

son, who took his legacy to Ireland, and by virtue of 
it established himself as chief ruler of the Isle. He 
placed the stone on the famous hill of Tara, where it 
served as the coronation seat of a long succession of 
Irish kings. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about 
the stone was that it gave forth a peculiar sound each 
time a king sat on it, which intimated its opinion of 
the new ruler, and this judgment was deemed prophet- 
ical of the nature of the reign ; but it seems to have 
lost its power of thus expressing its opinion of fledg- 
ling monarchs when it was removed from Tara. 

The behef was general that wherever was found the 
stone the Scottish race was certain to rule. Fergus, 
first king of the Scots in Scotland, carried the stone of 
mystery with him when he crossed over to that country 
nearly four hundred years before Christ, and deposited 
it in the castle of DunstafFnage, near Oban. In that 
residence of the early Scotch kings it remained until 
the year 834, when it was conveyed by Kenneth II to 
Scone. From then on the history of the stone be- 
comes more authentic. It was placed in the monastery 
burial-ground. When a coronation took place the 
stone was covered with cloth of gold, and the king was 
conducted to it with impressive pomp by the greatest 
nobles of the realm. Crowds of people gazed on the 
solemn scene from a near hill known as the Mount of 
Belief, or vulgarly as " Boot Hill," a title which has a 



io6 The Land of Heather 

curious legendary explanation. The legend is that 
when the barons came to be present at a coronation 
they stood in boots half-filled with earth. Each had 
brought this soil froin his native district that he might 
take part in the ceremonies standing on his " own 
land." At the close of the exercises the boots were 
taken off and emptied, and in process of time these 
emptyings formed Boot Hill. 

The " Stone of Destiny " was the visible sign of the 
Scotch monarchy, and its loss was keenly felt when 
Edward I of England bore it off to Westminster Abbey. 
No sooner had Scotland won its freedom, than King 
Robert Bruce, in concluding the treaty of peace with 
the English, stipulated that the stone should be re- 
stored. But the Londoners rose in a mob to resist 
the fulfilling of this provision, and the treaty was later 
abrogated to allow the stone to continue at Westmin- 
ster. There it was nearly three hundred years after- 
ward, when a purely Scottish prince, James, son of Mary 
Stuart, ascended the English throne. The two king- 
doms then became one, and all parties concerned were 
as content to have the stone in London as elsewhere. 

After the day spent at Perth and Scone I travelled 
eastward to Kinross, on the shores of Loch Leven. I 
suppose the majority of visitors are drawn to the loch 
by its fishing, reputed to be the finest in the British 
Isles, but for me its attraction consisted in the music 



Historic Ground 107 

of its name and its association with Scotch song, story, 
and history. Of all the nooks and corners into which 
my rambling in the vicinity of Kinross led me, I liked 
best a little grove of trees just back from the reedy 
borders of the lake, not far from the village. It 
afforded a most agreeable shelter and lounging-place, 
especially in the cloudy and windy weather that pre- 
vailed during my sojourn. The waters were gray and 
white-capped and the sky was rarely otherwise than 
dull and threatening, though now and then blue loop- 
holes appeared which let stray patches of sunshine 
through. Usually a wild duck or two would be in 
sight, bobbing over the waves with corklike buoyancy. 
The view was pleasing, but not in any wise striking. 
Across the lake rose a green, treeless mountain-range, 
and another fine grassy range lay southward, while the 
loch itself was dotted with a number of small islands. 
On the largest of these, fLve acres in extent, stood the 
battered ruin of a castle peeping out from among 
the trees, and imparting a most stirring interest to the 
scene, for those walls long ago held Mary, Queen of 
Scots, a prisoner. She was only twenty-five years of 
age, yet shortly before she had married for the third 
time. This marriage followed close on the assassina- 
tion of her second husband, Lord Darnley, in whose 
death the new consort, the Earl of Bothwell, was be- 
lieved to be implicated. Civil war resulted, and the 



io8 The Land of Heather 

queen fell into the hands of her enemies, and was 
taken to this lonely island in Loch Leven. 

It was her first real imprisonment, though there had 
been short periods previously, in her checkered career, 
when she had been held in restraint scarcely less har- 
assing. The southeastern tower of the castle was set 
apart for her lodgings, and Lady Douglas was ap- 
pointed her jailer. Though the queen*s followers had 
been beaten and dispersed in the recent strife, her party 
was by no means extinct, and the leaders were continu- 
ally plotting, while they awaited a favorable opportunity 
to effect her release and restore her to power. Neither 
the prison walls nor the isolation sufficed to prevent her 
from keeping in constant secret communication with her 
friends. She was ably aided in this by her faithful ser- 
vant, John Beaton, who hovered in disguise near Loch 
Leven, and never failed to find means of carrying mes- 
sages to and fro. 

At length George Douglas, son of the royal prison- 
er's jailer, became interested in her behalf, and assisted 
her in arranging a plan of escape with an association 
of loyal gentlemen who had pledged themselves to 
break her chains. But before the project could be 
carried out it was betrayed, and George Douglas was 
expelled from the castle in disgrace, and forbidden ever 
to set foot on the island again. 

Restraints were redoubled; yet it was only a few 



Historic Ground 109 

days later that the queen nearly succeeded in getting 
away. A laundress was employed who came across 
the water frequently from Kinross to fetch and carry 
the linen belonging to her Majesty and her ladies. 
This laundress consented to assist the queen to regain 
her freedom. George Douglas, who, though expelled 
from the castle, remained concealed in the house of a 
friend at Kinross, was to help also. Until the plans 
were perfected, Mary pretended to be ill, and passed 
her mornings in bed, apparently indifferent to every- 
thing. But one day, when the laundress came as usual, 
and went to the queen's room to deliver the clothes 
she had washed, and tie up and carry away another 
bundle, Mary slipped out of bed and disguised herself 
in the woman's humble garments. Then she drew a 
muffler over her face, took the soiled clothes in her 
arms, and passed out of the castle to the boat unsus- 
pected. All went well until, midway between the for- 
tress and the shore, one of the rowers, fancying there 
was something peculiar about the bearing of their pas- 
senger, said jokingly to his assistant, " Come, let us 
see what manner of dame this is." 

Suiting the action to the word he endeavored to pull 
aside the lady's muffler. She put up her hands to re- 
sist, and their whiteness and delicacy made known her 
identity. She ordered the rowers to go on and take 
her to the shore, and threatened to punish them if they 



no The Land of Heather 

refused ; but they were aware how powerless she was, 
and instead they rowed back to the island, agreeing, 
however, not to inform any one of her attempted flight. 

Soon after this Mary found an effective ally in a 
boy of sixteen, who acted as page to the lady of the 
castle. This lad went by the name of WiUie Douglas, 
though among the inmates of the fortress he was 
oftener spoken of as " Orphan Willie,'' or " Foundhng 
Willie," from the fact that he had been discovered lying 
near the castle entrance when an infant, abandoned 
to the good-will of those within. WilHe became a 
most ardent votary of the captive queen, and he told 
her that below her tower was a postern gate, through 
which they sometimes went out in one of the boats on 
the lake ; he would get the boat ready and bring the 
key of the gate. The boy got word to George Doug- 
las, and a company of armed horsemen concealed them- 
selves in a glen across the water, ready to become an 
escort for the queen the moment she was liberated. 

The guards who kept watch night and day at the 
gates of her Majesty's tower were accustomed to quit 
their post at half-past seven each evening, long enough 
to sup with the castle household in the great hall. 
Meanwhile the five large keys attached to an iron chain 
were placed beside Sir William Douglas on the table 
at which he and his mother sat in state. While wait- 
ing oh the knight and the lady Orphan Willie con- 



Historic Ground 1 1 1 

trived to drop a napkin over the keys and get them 
off the table without being detected. Much elated, he 
ran with them to the queen's tower. Mary knew his 
plans, and was ready to start as soon as he appeared. 
She was attired in the clothes of one of her maids, who 
stayed behind to personate her royal mistress. The 
queen hurried to the boat, and Willie locked all the 
gates behind them and threw the keys into the water. 
Then with all his might he rowed for the opposite 
shore. The loyal horsemen met them, and they were 
off into the night. 

After fourteen months' imprisonment Mary Queen 
of Scots was free, yet in nearly all the days following 
she was a fugitive, even until she fell into the hands of 
Elizabeth of England, and once more was behind 
prison walls, no more to have Hberty save as death on 
the scaffold released her and ended her troubled, fate- 
ful Hfe. 

From Kinross I went to Edinburgh, the most pic- 
turesque and interesting large town in Britain. The 
ground on which it is built is much wrinkled into hills 
and valleys, and on a crag that overtops all the rest is 
the castle. The town's origin is lost in dim antiquity, 
but no doubt its founders were attracted to the spot 
by the defensive advantages of the steep isolated castle 
rock. There they built their clay fort, and then they 
began tilling the land in the valleys and on the hills 



112 The Land of Heather 

neighboring, and when danger threatened, they drove 
their cattle to the rock. On three sides the eminence 
drops away almost perpendicularly, but on the fourth 
side it slopes gently eastward in the form of a narrow 
ridge, along the top and sides of which a town grad- 
ually formed. 

1 had not been long in Edinburgh before I turned 
my steps castleward, crossed the drawbridge that spans 
the ancient moat, and dodged along through the guides 
who blocked the way with offers of their services until 
I passed under the portcullis-guarded arch of the en- 
trance. As I went in a squad of Scotch soldiers 
marched jauntily out with their pipes jigging merrily 
on ahead. The soldiers with their bare knees, their 
kilts, high black hats, and other fancy fixings, looked 
more as if they were gotten up for a circus parade than 
for war, but they were tall, brawny fellows, and I do 
not question their effectiveness. 

The castle is to-day mainly composed of heavy, 
gray stone barracks of no great antiquity, but among 
the rest is a tiny chapel erected about eight hundred 
years ago, which claims to date back farther than any 
other building in Scotland. The sole occupant of the 
chapel, as I saw it, was an old woman who sat behind 
an array of guide-books for sale, like a venerable spider 
in its lair, hopeful of enticing unwary flies. In a room 
near by one can look through some iron bars at the 



Historic Ground 113 

ancient Scottish crown, sceptre, and other gewgaws of 
this sort ; but there was to me much more charm in 
the view from the fortification parapets off over the 
smoky city. The castle stands at the far end of the 
ridge, where the rock rises highest, and you cannot but 
think the situation must have possessed almost im- 
pregnable strength in the days before the invention of 
heavy siege pieces. Nothing, too, would seem more 
unHkely than escape from the dungeon prisons hewn 
in the solid rock ; yet the castle has been often taken, 
and prisoners have frequently found means to get free. 
Even the almost vertical cliffs have been scaled on 
occasions, and it is one of the pleasures of the present- 
day little boys of Edinburgh to risk their necks in 
trying to climb the crags. 

Close under the base of the hill to the north is a 
narrow glen. Through the centre of this runs the 
railway, but the rest is laid out in lawns and flower- 
beds, with a mingling of shrubbery and trees. For- 
merly a body of water known as the North Loch filled 
the hollow. The loch was a great help in affording 
protection from that direction. To gain something 
of the same security on the other side a wall was 
erected. For many centuries the inhabitants huddled 
their dwellings along the ridge immediately east 
of the castle, and they were all loath to build out- 
side the city wall, because a house thus exposed 



114 The Land of Heather 

was nearly certain to be rifled and burned. Nor was a 
house inside the walls wholly safe. The town was 
within easy access from the English borders, and again 
and again the southern raiders gained entrance and 
robbed and wrecked the houses as they willed, while 
the people fled to the castle and to the shelter of the 
surrounding forests. 

Edinburgh became the recognized capital of the 
kingdom after the murder of James I at Perth in 
1437. No other city in the realm afforded as great 
security to the royal household against the designs of 
the nobles, and thenceforth it was their place of resi- 
dence. There parUament met, and there were located 
the mint and various other government offices. Its im- 
portance was in this way greatly increased, and it grew 
more and more densely populated. But the days of 
feudalism were not yet past, and wars, plottings, and 
lawlessness abounded. Edinburgh was a centre of 
this ferment, for which reason the inhabitants were as 
reluctant as ever to live outside the walls. To gain 
room they expanded their houses skyward. The 
town at this period consisted of the original chief 
thoroughfare called the High Street and a parallel 
way on the south, narrow and confined, that was 
known as the Cowgate, and not until the middle of 
the eighteenth century did the citizens begin to build 
beyond the limits. The High Street and the Cowgate 



Historic Ground iij 

were connected by scores of narrow cross alleys, or 
closes. The dwellings seldom contained less than six 
floors. Often there were ten or twelve floors, and 
the great height to which the houses towered was the 
more imposing because they were built on an emi- 
nence. "Auld Reekie" is the term applied to this 
section of the city, and it is grimy enough with the 
stains of smoke and age to amply merit the name. 
The sanitary conditions are in many respects those of 
the fourteenth century, and scores of families are 
crowded in some of the tall structures. Probably 
no other city in the kingdom, not even London, has 
such grewsome rookeries. 

Frequently the old houses with their thick walls 
and narrow entrances have the strength of fortresses. 
They were indeed originally the houses of the aristoc- 
racy of the town, who were noted for their intrigues 
and violence, and with whom a house capable of de- 
fence was a matter of some importance. As the city 
grew and the social conditions of the country became 
more stable, the gentry abandoned Auld Reekie and 
built houses in the newer sections of the city, while 
their former domiciles fell into the hands of the most 
desperate of the poor. Yet the finer and more modern 
portion of the town is prosaic and commonplace, while 
in Auld Reekie you cannot but feel a marvellous attrac- 
tion in the ancient gray walls and crooked, deep-worn 



ii6 The Land of Heather 

stairways, and the picturesque outthrust of poles from 
the windows with a few rags of washing fluttering on 
them, and in the heaps of chimney-pots with their 
blue curlings of smoke. These old buildings have a 
sentiment that is never found in new ones — a some- 
thing akin to human that comes from their long con- 
nection with life and its daily labor, its aspirations and 
its troubles. What stories the old stones could tell 
if they had speech ! What tragedies and dark deeds 
they must have witnessed ! 

In the summer weather when I wandered among 
the tall houses, most of the windows were open, and 
some occupant leaning out over the sill was rarely 
lacking. The doorways likewise had their loiterers, 
and the sidewalks and narrow wynds and closes were 
thickly populated. There were some dreadful-looking 
creatures to be seen on Auld Reekie's byways. Once 
I was startled in turning the corner of an alley to find 
two women fighting. They were barefoot, bareheaded, 
dishevelled, and hideous. One was old and black-faced, 
and had some sort of burden gathered up in her apron. 
The other, who was younger, but hardly less ill-favored, 
was brandishing her fists in her companion's face and 
talking hysterically and crying. Finally she knocked 
the old woman down. But that ancient got up nim- 
bly, and the two indulged in further loud-voiced abuse. 
Then they separated, and the gathering crowd dispersed. 



Historic Ground 117 

The High Street as it descends the hill from the 
castle at length merges into the Canongate, and the 
latter thoroughfare continues the gentle downward 
course for about a mile to the big, dark-looking pile 
of Holyrood Palace. A Httle to one side of the palace 
is a roofless ruin, all that is left of an abbey built in the 
year 11 28 by King David I and named in honor of 
the holy cross or rood brought to Scotland a few years 
previously by St. Margaret. Two centuries later this 
" black rood of Scotland," as it was called, fell into 
English hands, and no more is known of it. Thrice 
the abbey was burned by the southern foe, and a fourth 
time it was plundered and burned by the mob at the 
revolution of 1688. For seventy years after that it 
remained neglected, and when it was finally repaired 
the roof proved too heavy, and fell in. The abbey 
has continued a ruin ever since that disaster. 

The foundations of a palace apart from the abbey 
were laid in 1503, and Holyrood became the chief seat 
of the Scottish sovereigns. It is as the residence of 
the ill-starred Queen Mary that it most stirs the in- 
terest of the average visitor. You can see her rooms, 
and her alleged furniture, including the bed in which 
she slept, a curious aflfair with immensely tall posts 
that hold a canopy aloft high toward the ceiling. Its 
quilts and draperies are faded now and dropping to 
pieces, and it is a question whether the bed in its better 



ii8 The Land of Heather 

days was rich and beautiful or overcolored and tawdry. 
The impression the rooms made on me was that the 
household comforts of the old kings and queens were 
not such as to stir much modern envy. 

When I departed from Edinburgh, it was to go to 
Stirling, a town curiously like the one I had left, in its 
physical characteristics, for it is overlooked in the same 
way by a great castle on the heights of a mountainous 
crag. The situation, by reason of its defensive strength 
and its position in the narrowest part of the northern 
kingdom, makes it the natural key to the Highlands, 
and it was often assaulted in the quarrels of the clans 
or besieged in turn by Scotch and EngHsh. 

Across the valley to the northeast is a tall monu- 
ment erected to the greatest of Scotch heroes, William 
Wallace. It stands on a rocky cliff and is visible for 
miles around, and it commands the scene of Wallace's 
most famous encounter with the EngHsh. He was 
posted on the north bank of the Firth of Forth, which 
here has the breadth of a moderate river and was 
spanned at that time by a single narrow wooden bridge. 
The enemy, fifty thousand strong, lay on the opposite 
side, but after some days' delay began to file over. 
Until half the English had crossed the bridge, Wal- 
lace held his followers in check and gave no sign. 
-Then he fell on the invaders with such determination 
that they were thrown into confusion and a headlong 



Historic Ground 119 

rout ensued. Thousands were slain, and many more 
were drowned in the river, and Wallace for the time 
being had " set his country free," as he had declared 
was his intention. 

Barely three miles from Stirling is a still more 
notable battleground — the field of Bannockburn. I 
found conveyance thither in a public omnibus which 
left me right in the centre of the ancient scene of con- 
flict on a broad hilltop. From here Bruce is said to 
have directed the battle, and a heavy stone embedded 
in the earth is pointed out as having served him a^ a 
seat and a support for his flagstaff. The stone was 
flat and had a hole in the middle, and looked very like 
a common grindstone ; but lest any one should be 
tempted to carry it oflF for such use it has been slatted 
over with iron rods — or was this to preserve it from 
the desecration of the relic hunters ? 

I followed the rustic road down the hill and stopped 
on a quaint old " brig " arching the stream that gave 
the battlefield its name. In the ravine below me 
was the Bannockburn, a pretty brook worrying along 
through the boulders that filled its channel, and wan- 
dering away in a crooked course through the peaceful 
farm fields. I could detect no sign that a great battle 
had ever been fought here, so slight is the effect on 
nature of man's turmoils. The seasons as they come 
and go erase all marks of ravage and devastation, and 



I20 The Land of Heather 

quickly restore the tranquillity that has been momen- 
tarily interrupted. 

Bannockburn was the climax in the career of that 
most notable of all Scotch monarchs, Robert Bruce. 
In the year 1290 we find him one of thirteen pretend- 
ers to the throne, and he spent fifteen years thereafter 
courting the favor of the king of England. At the 
end of that period he withdrew to Scotland. Im- 
mediately afterward he attracted general attention by 
stabbing a rival claimant at Dumfries, in the church 
of, the Grey Friars. Then he hastened to Scone and 
assumed the crown. Scotland was at once roused to 
arms, and war with England began. For a time the 
Scotch only met disaster, and Bruce had to fly to the 
Highlands. He found the chiefs there bitterly hostile 
to his cause, and during several years his experiences 
were those of a desperate adventurer. But adversity 
made him a noble leader of a nation's cause. He was 
hardy and strong, of commanding presence, brave, and 
genial in temper. The legends tell how he was tracked 
by bloodhounds into the remote glens, how he on one 
occasion held a pass single-handed against a crowd of 
savage clansmen, how sometimes he and his little band 
of fugitives had nought to eat save what they could 
get by hunting and fishing, and how Bruce himself 
had more than once to fling off his shirt of mail and 
scramble up the crags to escape his pursuers. 



Historic Ground 121 

Little by little, however, his affairs grew brighter, 
until at length the Black Douglas espoused his cause. 
From that time Bruce rapidly won adherents and terri- 
tory, and by 13 13 he had retaken nearly all the king- 
dom, and even invaded the northern counties of 
England, levying money and gathering such plunder 
as he could carry away. Only Stirling castle remained 
to the English, and the governor of that stronghold 
was so sorely pressed he agreed, unless meanwhile 
relieved, to surrender on June 24 of the following 
year. The English, to avoid this catastrophe and to 
prevent Scotland from slipping wholly out of their 
hands, collected an enormous army. It numbered not 
far from one hundred thousand fighting men, though 
a large proportion consisted of wild marauders from 
Ireland and Wales whose efficiency was not all it 
might be. 

Bruce by his utmost efforts could only muster thirty 
thousand, yet he prepared to confront the enemy a 
little to the south of Stirling. The position he selected 
was on the banks of the Bannockburn, where he was 
protected in part by the stream, and in part by numer- 
ous pits and trenches he directed his soldiers to dig. 
June 23d the English appeared and attempted unsuc- 
cessfully to force an entrance into the castle of Stirling 
with a body of cavalry. This failure was depressing, 
and they were still further disheartened by an incident 



122 The Land of Heather 

of the evening. An English knight, Henry de Bohun, 
observing Bruce riding along in front of his army, had 
made a sudden dash on him, intending to thrust .him 
through with his spear. The king was mounted on 
a small hackney and held in his hand only a light 
battle-axe, but he parried his opponent's spear and 
cleft his skull with so powerful a blow that the handle 
of the axe was shattered in his grasp. 

On the day following, the English advanced and 
assailed the whole line of the Scotch army, wrestling 
with it in a hand-to-hand combat. But the northern 
spearmen withstood the southern lancers and archers, 
and the desperate charges, many times repeated, only 
resulted in adding fresh heaps to the slain laid low by 
the valorous Scotch. The air was full of flying arrows 
and was hideous with the noise of clashing armor, 
the commingling of war-cries, and the groans of the 
wounded. Blood everywhere stained the ground, 
which was strewn with shreds of armor, broken spears, 
arrows, and pennons torn and soiled. The burn itself 
was so choked with fallen men and horses that it could 
be crossed dry-shod. 

As the day progressed, the attack weakened, and 
the Scotch began to push forward ; and finally the 
unexpected appearance of a body of the northern 
camp-followers whom the English mistook for reen- 
forcements to their opponents made the invading 



Historic Ground 



123 



host give way along the whole front. Bruce perceived 
this, and led his troops with redoubled fury against the 
failing ranks of the enemy. This onset turned the 
English defeat into a disorderly rout. All encum- 
brances were thrown away, and they made their way as 
best they could back to England, and if the Scotch 
had had sufficient cavalry, scarcely any would have 
escaped. Even as it was, nearly one-third of the 
original army was left dead- on the field, including two 
hundred knights and seven hundred squires. The 
loss of the Scotch was four thousand. By this victory 
at Bannockburn Bruce was firmly established on his 
throne and the independence of the kingdom was 
won, although desultory fighting continued for years. 




Queen Mary's Prison on an Isle of Lochleven 



VI 



THRUMS 




Palaulays 



IN nearly all 
the novels 
with which 
MrJ.M.Barrie 
has charmed the 
readers of two 
hemispheres. 
Thrums is the 
home of the 
characters intro- 
duced, and is the 
scene of most 
of the comedies 
and tragedies 
the author de- 
lights to depict. 



As the background of the entertaining mingling of 
Hfe's lights and shadows which is characteristic of his 
stories, it is a great satisfaction to find that Thrums 
is a real place and that it accords in many ways with 

124 



Thrums 125 

Mr. Barriers descriptions. Its name on the maps is 
Kirriemuir, though the inhabitants commonly shorten 
this to simply Kirrie ; and you will find it about sixty 
miles north of Edinburgh, at the end of a little branch 
railroad that leaves the main line at Forfar and cHmbs 
half a dozen twisty miles toward the hills. 

The industry that makes and supports the town is 
weaving, and in the hollow, where a little stream winds 
through the village, are two great stone mills that 
look very substantial and prosperous. They do work 
which fifty years ago was done wholly in the homes. 
Then, one would have heard the rattle of the hand- 
loom from every cottage, but now the mills furnish 
employment for most of the town inhabitants, and, 
though there is loss of picturesqueness, the people are 
undoubtedly better off. A few still cling to the ways 
of their forefathers, and from an occasional house the 
old-time clack of weaving even yet comes to the ears 
of the passer. However, competition with machinery 
is a losing struggle, and the hand-workers grow fewer 
every year. 

As a rule the people appeared neater and thriftier 
than those of the average Scotch town. There were 
none of the barefoot women and few of the barefoot 
children that one finds plentiful in most villages. 
Making a Hving is not as oppressive a grind in Kirrie 
as it might be. If a street musician strays into the 



126 The Land of Heather 

place, he is sure to carry away a liberal weight of small 
coins, and when a circus takes possession of the little 
square, it is always well patronized. 

This small paved square, bounded about by the 
various shops of the tradespeople, with the tiny town 
hall on one side, is the village centre. From it the 
houses streak away in the most chancing fashion up 
the valleys and along the hillsides. No doubt this 
haphazard character is due to the uncertain and hum- 
mocky lay of the land. Wherever you walk you are 
either going up or down a hill, and the hill is likely to 
be steep at that. The streets are crooked and have 
unexpected turns in them, and there are frequent little 
lanes that have an odd way of jerking around corners 
and dodging under houses. 

The dwellings are nearly all of red sandstone from 
a quarry high on the hillside. In most cases the 
houses are weather-darkened and battered, though 
some of the older cottages have walls coated with plas- 
ter, and certain others get periodical brightenings of 
whitewash. To the last class belongs the house that 
of all others in Thrums is the centre of the Barrie in- 
terest. You go down a steep hill from the town square, 
cross the stone brig that spans the burn, and at once 
begin the ascent of the famous brae (the Scotch word 
for a steep roadway or hillside). When you get to the 
elbow of the brae, there is Hendry's cot before you at 




3 2 



Thrums 



127 



the top of the hill. It is a one-story house with a 
narrow garden in front, and in its gable is a tiny win- 
dow that you feel sure is Jess's window as soon as you 
see it. This window looks easterly down the brae and 
over the town ; and it is remarkable when one goes 
about the village and the surrounding hill-slopes how 
often the cot at the top of the brae is in sight, and how 
the little window seems watching you as if the house 
had an eye. In Mr. Barrie's description the cottage 
roof is of thatch, with ropes flung over it to keep it on 
in wind. But now the roof is rudely slated. Thatch 
is out of date in Kirriemuir. Yet there was one rusty 
Hne of cottages on a neighboring hill that still retained 
its ancient coat of straw, and the straw was secured from 
the clutches of the gales by strips of board fastened 
on it. 

Hendry's cot had tenants, and they were plainly of 
a thrifty turn of mind, for a black sign hung on the 
house walls that labelled the place "A Window in 
Thrums," and announced that souvenirs and lemonade 
were for sale. If you choose to go up the short walk 
through the garden and rap at the door, the dwellers 
within will readily show you the house interior. There 
is not much to see — just two small rooms with a bit 
of a passage between. To the right is the kitchen, 
with its fireplace, bed, table, and a few other primitive 
furnishings. To the left is " the room," in which is a 



128 The Land of Heather 

second bed, several haircloth chairs, and a spreaded 
table with tin elaborate lamp on it, and a few books 
laid around the edges in regular order. 

Upstairs is an unfinished attic that you climb to by 
a step-ladder through a trap-door, exactly as in the 
days when the schoolmaster boarded in the house. 
There is very little save dust and rubbish in the attic 
now, but it is lighted by the little window that gives 
the name to Mr. Barrie's book, though, for the sake 
of realism, this window should be in the kitchen below. 

The working class in Thrums had but a poor opin- 
ion of the novelist's books. Nothing happens in " A 
Windo\y in Thrums," they informed me deprecatingly, 
but what they saw every day. The talk was the talk 
they heard next door — mere "bairn's havers," they 
said, "juist Kirrie balderdash." They thought it was 
unquestionably great rubbish, and accounted for its 
popularity by the theory that chance had made it a 
fad ; after this factitious interest had faded they had 
no doubt other folks would be as sick of the stuff as 
they were. 

Nor were they suited with the author himself. He 
is not large enough, is too retiring, goes about with his 
hands behind him, looking straight ahead as if he 
lived in some dream world of his own — and how 
could you expect a man of that size and manner to 
write anything worth while ? 



Thrums 129 

Among those who thus criticised Mr. Barrie was a 
woman who told me a long story of how she and her 
parents and children and grandchildren had all lived 
in the little Window in Thrums house. They had 
only recently moved out of it, and she supposed they 
were the real heroes and heroines of Barrie's tale. 
Like enough she, herself, was meant for Jess — if she 
wasn't, she didn't know who was. Then she said she 
would tell me the true origin of the title of the book. 
One stormy night some young fellows set out to rob 
a neighboring orchard and they wanted her son to go 
out with them. They knew he slept in the attic, 
and so they took some apples and came into the 
garden and threw them up at the little window to 
arouse him. Her son was away, as it happened, and 
pretty soon she and her sister, sleeping below, heard 
the apples come rolling down through the trap-door 
from the vacant apartment overhead. They were 
scared, and they awakened their father, who found the 
little window broken, and the rain pouring in. He 
called down to them how it was — and what should he 
do ? In a corner of the loomshop at the far end of 
the house were a lot of "thrums" — waste ends of 
the warp which have to be cut off every time the weav- 
ing of a roll of cloth is finished. It was these thrums 
they used to stop the window and keep the rain out. 
That made " The Window in Thrums," or, more 



ijo The Land of Heather 

properly, " the thrums In the window." I fancy this 
origin of the title would be news to Mr. Barrie himself 

The first nine years of his life the novelist lived in 
" the tenements," a block of old, plastered houses 
which are the homes of the humblest of the weavers. 
It was there he picked up his close knowledge of the 
language and ways of the poor, and his keen feelincr 
for all their traits, from petty pride up to unconsciour 
heroism. In later years his abode was in a substantial 
stone house just across the road from Hendry's cot at 
the top of the brae. Curiously enough, Mr. Barrie 
has never been inside the cottage he has made famous. 
But his readers and admirers go through it with suffi- 
cient care to make up for his delinquency, and they 
spare no effort to make the little house fit his descrip- 
tions in every detail. 

It is a little remarkable how many places can be 
identified in the Kirriemuir region as the veritable 
ones described in the book. First, of course, is the 
cot and the little window, and the brae with its carts 
and its people always going up and down. Then, 
near by, is the steep hillside of the commonty bounded 
about with hedgerows, and crisscrossed with uncared- 
for dirt paths. Here the children play, and here the 
women still come at times to dry their washing. 
T'nowhead farm and its pigpen are not far away, and 
at the other side of the town is the auld licht manse 



Thrums 131 

that was the home of " The Little Minister." The 
burying-ground road still climbs to the hillside ceme- 
tery with all its old-time straightness, and on the village 
borders is " The Den," of which so much is made 
in " Sentimental Tommy." This den, or, to use the 
English equivalent for the word — this ravine, is a 
bit of meadow hemmed about with steep, grassy ridges 
and rocky precipices. The villagers gather in the den 
every pleasant summer evening and lounge on the 
grass, or loiter along the walks, or play games and 
join in a Highland dance to the music of the village 
band. 

One of the people whom I met m Kirriemuir was 
the dulseman. He was the same whom Hendry 
used to patronize, and I saw him every evening 
with his barrow on the square. He was a very stolid, 
slow sort of person, whom nothing short of an earth- 
quake could have moved to the least excitement. On 
his barrow he carried a long box that held a bushel or 
two of the seaweed, and a shorter box that contained 
a couple of kettles full of buckies (sea-snails) which he 
had boiled with a flavoring of salt that day. The 
evening loiterers bought and ate these things much 
the same as our loiterers buy and eat peanuts. 

When a Kirrie man approached the dulse-barrow, 
he turned sidewise to it and said, " Penny's worth o' 
buckies," and the dulseman scooped up a tin cup full 



132 



The Land of Heather 



and emptied them into his customer's coat pocket. 
Then the man helped himself to a pin out of a rusty- 
tray in the bucky box, or pulled one out of the bottom 
of his vest, and went over to the curbing, where he 
talked with his friends, and at the same time extracted 
the morsels from their shells. The shells were 
dropped on the paving of the square, and it was 
astonishing what a strewing of them there was by the 
end of the evening. 

If a man bought dulse, the vendor picked up his 
fingers full twice for a bawbee (halfpenny) and stuffed 
it in the man's pocket for him to nibble at leisure. 
When a woman bought, she received her seaweed in 
her apron, while the children usually carried theirs off 
in their hats. I was told that buckles were not good 
for one's stomach — they only pleased the palate, but 
that the dulse was medicinal, and helped digestion. I 
tried a bit of the seaweed one evening, and, except that 
it was leathery, and that its peculiar salt-water taste stayed 
in my mouth for an hour afterward, it was not bad. I 
did not get up sufficient courage to try the buckles. 
When twisted out of their shells, they looked too Hke 
dark earthworms to be appetizing. 

The most old-fashioned of all the Thrums dwell- 
ings were those that made the Hne of cottages under 
the thatched roof In the far end of this Hne of cot- 
tages lived Jimmie Donaldson and his granddaughter. 




Spinning a ** Peerie 



Thrums 



^33 



Jimmie was a telegraph boy, and, in spite of his ninety 
years, was always ready to run with messages night or 
day. He thought nothing of a six or eight mile tramp. 
He was a kindly, talkative slip of an old man, very 
poor, yet too independent to take a tip for small ser- 
vices. His work brought him only intermittent wages, 
and this fact often made him so downhearted that he 
found it necessary to cheer himself up by spending 
what he earned for occasional drops of liquor. The 
granddaughter worked in the mill, and it was she who 
was the mainstay of the household. 

Jimmie had three rooms, but as one was a rude 
scullery that looked like a cellar, and another a loft 
used only for storage, the little kitchen was practically 
the home and all of it. This kitchen had a tiny fire- 
place, two small tables, a tall clock, a few chairs that 
only the greatest care would coax to stand level on the 
uneven dirt floor, and some other odds and ends. 
Two box beds filled one side of the room. A great 
many of the Kirrie kitchens had box beds in them. 
This type of bed, as its name signifies, is literally in a 
box, but the box is of enormous size and extends from 
floor to ceiling, and the lid instead of being on the top 
is on the side fronting the room, and takes the form 
of double doors that fold back to give convenient 
entrance. The idea is that you can step in, pull the 
doors to, and prepare for bed without its making any 



134 The Land of Heather 

difference whether the room is occupied or not. After 
you are under the clothes you push the door open 
and get some air to breathe. 

Old-fashioned people believe that the box bed has 
special advantages in time of sickness ; for if the patient 
wishes quiet and darkness, it is only necessary to close 
the doors and the invalid is shut away from the outer 
world completely, with no trouble at all. 

In the kitchen that I have described the telegraph 
boy, Jimmie, and his granddaughter cooked, ate, 
washed, made their toilets — did everything. But 
Jimmie was satisfied. He said a doctor had told him 
that people who slept in a box bed and had a thatch 
roof overhead and a dirt floor underfoot lived the 
longest. He was much interested in the " States,** 
and said he had two daughters over there, one in 
Meriden, Con., and the other in Mish. I don't know 
what he thought Con. and Mish. were, but I recog- 
nized Connecticut and Michigan. 

My final sight of Jimmie was on the last evening 
of my stay in Kirriemuir. I was in the stationer's 
shop on the square when the old man came in and 
held out a grimy hand for me to shake. His face was 
red, for he had been having a dram or two, and he 
was inclined to take a dismal view of life. He'd only 
had " one telegram the week, only a saxpence, and a 
man could no live on that." 



Thrums 



135 



The stationer offered him his snuff-box, and Jimmie 
took a pinch, but it did not revive his spirits, and his 
farewell to me was full of dubious foreboding. 

" I shall never see you again," he said. 

" Oh, perhaps you may," I responded, with an 
attempt at cheerfulness. 

" Will you come next year? " he inquired. " But I 
won't be here if you do," he added. " Til be in hell 
then." 

He shook hands once more, said " Good-by," and 
went out on the street. 




The Window in Thrums House 



VII 



A HIGHLAND GLEN 



ITS name was Glen 
Clova, a title suggest- 
ive of rural sweetness 
and overflowing fertility. 
The reality was a wide fis- 
sure opening back into the 
great bounding heather 
hills, and its name was 
almost its only touch of 
gentleness. Yet there was 
charm in the little river 
Esk which wound through 
the meadow bottoms, and 
the vastness of the encom- 
passing hills was impres- 
sive, while even the lonely bareness of the region was 
of its kind beautiful. 

The glen's remoteness was attested to my senses in 
many ways — by the peatstacks I found in the farm- 
yards, by the presence of the wild deer on the high 

136 




Returning from Market 



A Highland Glen 137 

moors, by the snow-banks which glistened white in the 
ravines of the craggy mountains until midsummer, and 
by the peewits and the water-birds which screamed 
at me when I walked about the fields, as if wholly 
unused to the sight of a stranger. The district was 
very destitute of trees, though frequent newly started 
"plantings" covered great patches of the upland. 
Small woods were numerous outside the valley, south- 
ward; but at the time of my visit a good share of the 
trees in these woods had been blown over by a terrible 
gale of the year before. The power of the storm had 
been such that it made even the heaviest stone dwell- 
ings tremble, frightening the people, tearing slates from 
roofs, shattering byres, and turning over the cornstacks 
in the stackyards. The morning after the gale some 
of the woods on the exposed ridges had not a tree left 
standing. Even now, a twelvemonth later, much of 
the woodland wreckage had not yet been cleared away, 
and it was a melancholy sight — these tangles of dead 
branches and shattered trunks, and the earth all turned 
up edgewise with the canting of the roots. 

I found lodging while I stayed in the glen at a 
farmhouse under a rough spur of one of the great hills 
known as Craig Eggie. The best room in the house 
was mine as long as my sojourn lasted. The room 
was one the family was inclined to boast of, and Mrs. 
Fearn, the farmer's wife, wanted to know if we had 



138 The Land of Heather 

any better than that in America. It was an eminently 
respectable room, with a carpet, wall-paper, pictures, etc. 
— indeed, was much like a New England sitting room, 
except for the presence of a bed and a small fireplace. 
At the foot of the bed stood a tall clock. This clock 
was just half an hour behind time, and was also original 
in having a habit five minutes before it struck the 
hours of giving forth a peculiar sound as if something 
heavy had broken in the works and fallen down inside 
the case. When heard in the night the sound was 
quite startling. 

The evening of my first day in the glen was so 
chilly that after I had eaten supper in the best room 
I was glad to sit by the kitchen fireplace and watch 
the brisk flames crackling up from a heap of peat 
bricks while the wind hummed and rumbled in the 
chimney. The black teakettle suspended from the 
sway was adjusted low over the fire, and the water 
within boiled with such vigor that the cover rattled. 

On a rude bench behind an equally rude table at 
the far end of the room sat the hired man sucking in 
hot tea from his saucer. Under the table lay a black 
and white collie. Several hams and sides of bacon 
tied up in white bags were hung from hooks driven 
into the blotchy yellow ceiling. The women felt that 
this stained ceiling was something of a reproach ; but 
they said it was of no use to whitewash it, for the 



A Highland Glen 139 

peats were smoky things, particularly in dull, damp 
weather, and the ceiling would keep grimy and un- 
sightly, no matter what they did. The walls were 
more easily managed, and they were tidy with a 
pink whitewash renewed twice a year. The daughter 
of the house, a bright, energetic body named Mary 
Ann, did the whitewashing, and it was she who gave 
the long hearthstone before the fire periodical coats of 
bright blue paint, and made the stone framework of 
the fireplace and the wooden mantel above shine with 
appHcations of black varnish. The corner-stones at 
the base, supporting the bars of the grate, she pol- 
ished daily with black lead, while the inner sides of 
the fireplace, above the grate, she whitewashed every 
week, leaving just a narrow black path in the middle 
where the smoke coursed upward. 

Spring water, conducted through a pipe from its 
hillside source, came directly into the room, but " the 
big half" of the Glen Clova families had to go out to 
a running well (brook) for their water, and often were 
obliged to carry it quite a distance. 

While I sat talking with the family, the fire had 
been allowed to burn low, and now the stout mistress 
of the house went out to the peatstack in the yard and 
brought in a fresh supply of the brown blocks in her 
apron. She put some of the peat on the fire and 
dumped the rest down on the hearth. Then she 



140 The Land of Heather 

broke up some dry brush, tucked it into the grate, and 
sat down to encourage the slumbering flames with a 
pair of bellows. Immediately the fire brightened, and 
the air grew odorous with wisps of smoke that stole 
out into the room. 

Mrs. Fearn said the supply of bannocks was running 
short, and she must make more. Bannocks are flat, 
brittle cakes of oatmeal, as large around as a plate. In 
thickness and color they suggest sections of coarse sole 
leather, and no one unacquainted with them would 
suspect that they were good to eat. Their preparation 
consists in stirring up oatmeal with water into a thick 
dough, rolling lumps of it out into shape and then 
" firing " the rough disks one at a time in the fireplace. 
I do not mean, as the American vernacular would sug- 
gest, that the cakes were consigned forcibly to the 
flames. The term " firing," as applied to a bannock 
in Scotland, means first browning the under side on a 
griddle, and then setting it up edgewise on a toaster 
hung before the blaze, and letting the other side brown. 
When spread with butter and accompanied by a bit of 
cheese and a glass of milk or a cup of tea, the ban- 
nocks are so good that even an epicure would not dis- 
dain them. I think the Scotch feel a real pity for a 
person who does not eat them regularly, and love them. 

During my stay in the glen I had bannocks at every 
meal, and, besides the accessories that naturally go with 



A Highland Glen 141 

the cakes, I was given heather honey for a relish. The 
honey was in the honeycomb, and it was wonderfully 
rich, and tasted full of sunshine and blossoms. The 
bees gather the finest harvest of the year in the time of 
the heather-bloom. The clover honey that they make 
earlier is not nearly so deep in tint nor so densely 
sweet. Nor does it bring as much, when sold, into 
" tuppence " a pound. 

The day's work in the glen began at five o'clock. 
Mrs. Fearn and her daughter were always stirring by 
that time. The mother went at once to the byre to 
start milking the eight cows, but Mary Ann stayed in- 
doors to kindle the kitchen fire, and hang over it a 
great black pot full of oatmeal. Then she skimmed 
the milk in the dairy, and when the porridge was 
cooked and the tea boiled for the men's breakfast, she 
went out to help her mother finish milking. 

The cattle of the region were of a hornless variety, 
usually black, but sometimes gray or patched with 
white. The cows received very good care, and they, 
of all the farm animals, were the only ones that were 
invariably kept in the byres over night right through 
the year. It was thought to be too " cauld " for them 
in the fields, though during the warmer months the 
calves and horses were allowed to stay out continuously, 
and the sheep were not housed, even in winter. The 
sheep pastures were in the main bare grassland, or 



142 The Land of Heather 

heather hillsides ; but it was arranged that there should 
be a patch of woodland somewhere in the pasturage to 
which they could retire for shelter from the storms. 
If the winter was mild, the sheep might be able to pick 
up their own living, yet ordinarily they required some 
feeding. 

Raising calves was an important industry in the 
glen, and Farmer Fearn had quite a herd of them. 
Mary Ann fed them three times a day, the last time 
about nine or ten in the evening. She usually went 
out bareheaded, with a red shawl wound about her 
shoulders. While milking or doing dirty kitchen 
work, the women added greatly to their picturesque- 
ness by tucking their outer skirts up so that the folds 
only came halfway down. 

When they found I was interested in Scotch ways, 
they were at great pains to give me information, and 
they brought out for exhibition their photograph 
albums, and their hats and bonnets, and Mr. Fearn's 
best suit, and the cheese tub, and much else. I re- 
lated something of our American customs, and they 
were of the opinion that if the women here did no out- 
door work, and never milked, and never blacked the 
men's boots, they must sit by the fire and "rockit" a 
large part of the time. Mary Ann wanted I should 
tell the American girls that they did not do half 
enough. 



A Highland Glen 143 

Mr. Fearn paid a rent on his farm, to the Laird who 
owned all the hills and glens for miles around, of ^150 
a year. The farm consisted of eighty acres and a 
"butt." The eighty acres were rolling valley land. 
The butt was thin, heathery pasturage, " mostly 
steens " (stones), the farmer affirmed, that swept up a 
steep hillside and far on across a peat bog. 

" It is no easy getting a living here," Mr. Fearn 
explained, and he added that his hired help worked 
shorter hours and had more to show for their labor at 
the end of the year than he had. In cold seasons he 
could not ripen his corn (oats) enough so that the 
grain could be used for seed, and there were times 
when the little river Esk overflowed and stood like a 
loch in the meadows and " drowned " all the ^corn on 
the lowland. This year there had been white frosts in 
June after the potatoes were up two or three inches, 
ard every stalk was blackened and withered down to 
the ground. A belated scarecrow was still standing in 
one of Mr. Fearn's potato fields. It was made out of 
old clothes stuffed with hay, and it had its arms ex- 
tended, and an old hat fastened on top just like one 
of our scarecrows at home. But you would not find 
a scarecrow in a potato field with us. The rooks 
"howk" out the "tatties" in Scotland when their 
green sprouts first break up through the earth, and 
you may often see one of the black thieves carrying 



144 The Land of Heather 

off a recently planted tuber in its bill. In Glen Clova 
they called a scarecrow a " tattie-dooley/' which, trans- 
lated, means a potato-bogey. 

Late one afternoon I climbed up Mr. Fearn's butt 
of moor and over the rocky riggin (ridge) of the hill 
to a wide marsh. Scattered about the high waste were 
a few sheep feeding on the sparse grasses, but there 
were not enough of them to soften much the loneli- 
ness of the spot with the great heather hills gloom- 
ing all about. The farmer had finished cutting peat 
here only the day before, and where the dark banks 
had been laid bare, I could see that the bog was 
full of large roots and pieces of tree trunks — plainly it 
must once have been wooded. Good-sized oaks are 
found in some bogs, black with the peat stain to their 
hearts. The wood is perfectly sound, but it cracks 
badly when exposed to the air, and is not of much use 
except for fence posts, though in small pieces, carved 
and polished, it has value in the form of ornaments. 

The region around Glen Clova is good hunting 
ground, and the Laird let it for the winter shooting of 
grouse to a London gentleman at XS^^ ^ season. This 
sum was sufficient to make every brace of grouse the 
Londoner shot cost him a guinea. Back on the hills 
was a deer "forest'' that covered many square miles. 
The winter previous had been very cold and snowy, 
and the wild creatures had a hard time of it. The 



A Highland Glen 145 

grouse came In hundreds down to the roadway in the 
glen, and they would light in flocks on the stacks in 
the stackyards. The partridges and the crows were 
very famiHar, too. Rabbits and hares would come 
close to the houses, and in the morning, after a snow, 
the dooryards would be padded all over with their foot- 
marks. The deer descended from their native upland, 
and the farm folk would see them stringing along at 
the foot of the brae in the pastures. The farmers did 
not care to have them get into their turnip fields, and 
they would go out with their guns and frighten them 
back to the high moors. The creatures were " near 
deid wi' starvation," or they would not have ventured 
into the valley at all. Mr. Fearn killed a dozen of 
them and salted down their meat. The schoolmaster 
shot one right at the corner of the schoolyard, and for 
several nights he slept with his gun on his bed, ready 
for another. The deer spoiled a young planting of 
seven hundred acres of spruce, larch, and fir by getting 
into it and biting off the tops of the little trees. The 
planting was fenced, but deer are famous jumpers, and 
when urged by hunger, no protection short of six feet 
high would daunt them. 

At Craig Eggie the road down the valley was not 
passable to teams for nine weeks in midwinter, and 
Clova village, three miles above, was cut off from the 
world a week longer. Yet school kept as usual, and 



146 The Land of Heather 

though some of the scholars lived at a considerable dis- 
tance, the snow made little difference in the attendance. 
Glen Clova children are hardy, and save for the two or 
three smallest ones, they waded daily back and forth 
through the drifts. 

Very few of the scattered homes of the glen were so 
placed as to have near neighbors, and the only village 
cluster was up the valley at Clova, where were a 
church, a white manse, a hotel, and several small dwell- 
ings. The people from all the region around came 
every Sunday to attend service at the little church, some 
in gigs and dogcarts, but the large majority on foot. 

Years ago the glen was much more fully populated, 
and I everywhere came across the broken walls of old- 
time houses. One spot was pointed out to me where 
had been a group of thirty dwellings less than half a 
century before. Now there were only two — a farm- 
house and the lodge of a game-keeper. The van- 
ished homes had been mostly cotter houses, each with 
its little farm of three or four acres on which the cotter 
raised tatties and corn, and pastured his cow. In the 
cotter's kitchen of those bygone days, besides the one 
or two beds and other necessary furniture, would be a 
hand-loom. During the winter this was rarely idle, and 
it was more or less in use the year through. The 
cloth woven in these country houses was sold to a man- 
ufacturer in the nearest large town. When machine 



1 




■ 


J 


^^^M 






^B^^^m 




L 


i^^^mi^b . ^v^hH 



A Highland Glen 147 

weaving began to be general, the cotters found it diffi- 
cult to support their families wholly on the produce 
of the little farms, and they were obliged to seek the 
mills in the cities. 

The development of machinery and the country 
isolation has depopulated rural Scotland everywhere. 
One result is that it is not easy for the farmers to get 
help in the more remote districts. The laborers drift 
to the towns now more persistently than do the middle 
classes. Nor can one blame them, when one considers 
how they must live as agriculturists. 

A man hired out to a farmer, in addition to his 
wages, is allowed a flagon of milk daily and seventy 
pounds of oatmeal a month. The eating arrangements 
are simplicity itself He sits down to the table with a 
deep plate full of porridge and a bowl of milk before 
him, and with his horn spoon dips up, alternately, 
porridge and milk, until he reaches the bottom of the 
dishes. There are no further courses, and there is no 
variation in breakfast, dinner, and supper. Indeed, 
this is the bill of fare the year through in the more 
backward districts. But such plain living is not as 
satisfactory as it once was, and the man is very apt to 
sell part of his meal and get tea and an occasional 
piece of meat or loaf of bread. 

On the old-fashioned farms an unmarried laborer 
usually has a dwelling to himself — a little " placie " 



148 



The Land of Heather 



of one room known as a " bothy.'* Often three or 
four laborers inhabit the tiny stone-walled hovel to- 
gether. Each man has a kist for his clothes and other 
personal belongings, and a second kist for his oatmeal. 
A table, a few chairs, a kettle, a pot, and a water-pail 
complete the furnishings of the bothy. The man who 
lives in his employer's household has his allowance of 
meal and milk just the same as if he dwelt outside, but 
the farmer's wife does his cooking, and he is very likely 
given such extras as the family itself eats. Still, even 
at best, I did not wonder that laborers failed to find 
life on the isolated farms attractive, nor did it seem 
strange that the lonely glens were gradually being 
deserted by the farmers themselves. 



m^—— ^ . . .^ . . 




ifev,,,,;:-;:.---/ 



Ruins of a Cotter's Home 



VIII 



LOCHS AND BENS 



LAKES and mountains 
abound throughout 
the Highlands to an 
extent that in many sections 
leaves little else. Very few 
areas of any size have escaped 
the general upheaval, and 
such aspects of gentleness as 
these northern regions dis- 
play are usually confined to 
nooks and corners. Of this 
country of the lochs and bens 
no district possesses more 
charm in itself and in its 
literary and historic associa- 
tions than that which contains 
Water from the Well Lochs Katrine and Lomond, 

and, like most visitors to Scotland, I succumbed to the 
attraction of these twin lakes, and early one evening 

149 




150 The Land of Heather 

took a coach at Callander, the end of the railway Hne, 
to go through the Trossachs. The name Trossachs 
means bristled region, that is, a region of rocks, forest, 
and craggy mountain ridges, thrown together in rude 
disorder ; and this very aptly describes not a little of 
the landscape neighboring Katrine and Lomond. 

The coach was a great high affair with four seats 
running crosswise of its upper story, each intended to 
accommodate four persons. Every one wanted to 
mount aloft to get the benefit of the view, and the 
body of the conveyance was simply a hollow storage 
compartment for baggage. The place on a coach most 
coveted by the passengers is the front seat with the 
driver. Thence you get an unimpeded outlook and a 
chance to chat with the man who holds the reins and 
pick up information. On this trip two hustling 
Americans snapped up the sittings on the front seat. 
One was a gray little man with a toothless Hsp. The 
other was his wife, a ponderous, red-faced woman who 
was scarcely less intent than her husband to gobble up 
first places. As soon as the coach drove up to the 
station these two were right on hand, elbowing through 
the crowd, and their use of physical force and liberal 
tips to porters and driver, made it hopeless for any one 
else to compete with them. 

There were two other typical Americans on the load 
who at once made themselves apparent. They were a 











A Mountain Stream 



Lochs and Bens 151 

young man and a young woman, and It did not take 
much penetration to decide they were on their wed- 
ding-trip. The young man came briskly out of the 
station soon after the train arrived, and walked all 
around the coach to see if there were vacant seats. 
He had assumed an air intended to impress one that 
he was an experienced traveller, but no one took any 
stock in that, unless it was " Clara," his wife. Still we 
liked him. There was nothing mean and crowding 
about him as there was in the front seat couple. We 
had no trouble in discovering his wife's name, for he 
was not at all timid in his tones, and he spoke to be 
heard, on all occasions, no matter whom he addressed. 
" You get up on that seat, Clara," he would say, " and 
I'll get up here." Then later, " Are you all right, 
Clara," etc., etc., always loud and distinct, and Clara's 
name tacked on to every sentence. He did all he 
could, in the way of conversation and little attentions, 
to make Clara enjoy herself, and she seemed quite 
appreciative. 

Much of our journey was along the side of Loch 
Vennachar, with heather hills round about and Ben 
Venue's ragged summit looking down on us from the 
west. Toward eight o'clock we reached " The Tros- 
sachs Inn," a great, lonely stone hotel which, with 
its wings and turrets, looked like the mansion of some 
wealthy nobleman. In front of the inn the land 



152 The Land of Heather 

sloped down in pleasant meadows to Loch Achray. 
Behind it the hills climbed steep and high. I had the 
good fortune to be assigned to a room in one of the 
hotel turrets, with windows that overlooked the coun- 
try for miles. Best of all, the view included Ben 
Venue in the distance, lifting its calm heights far into 
the sky. 

Early the next morning I started for a walk up the 
valley. The road wound through a forest in which 
graceful, round-plumed birches were predominant, 
though occasional oaks and other trees were not lack- 
ing. The woodland was quite enchanting with the 
rank-growing ferns underneath, and the continual 
glimpses of lofty hills and mountain peaks. Now 
and then I saw a rowan tree brightening the wood 
with its clusters of scarlet berries, and again a high 
cliff would shoulder into view, its top overflowing 
with pink heather bloom. Once, in a marshy open, 
a red deer lifted its startled head, watched me a 
moment, and then bounded away with short, hoarse 
barks of alarm. Sometimes a rabbit scudded across 
the roadway ahead, or I caught a momentary glimpse 
of a bushy-tailed red squirrel whisking up a tree, and 
these various denizens of the woodland added greatly 
to the sylvan charm. 

Thus I went on, up and down the little hills 
through the ferny forest, till a turn in the road 



Lochs and Bens 



S3 



brought into sight the waters of Loch Katrine reach- 
ing back in blue inlets among the tree-crowned cliffs 
of its shores. In one of the little bays lay a steamer 
with a lazy wisp of smoke drifting up from its black 
chimney. It seemed out of place, and almost as sacri- 
legious as does the conveyance of the waters of this 
loch of romance through twenty-five miles of iron 
pipe to supply the city of Glasgow. But the lake 
water is remarkably pure, and what romance loses, 
the crowded humanity of the great town gains. 

I kept to the road that skirted the eastern shore for 
a mile to the famous " Silver Strand." This is no 
more than a bit of white, pebbly beach, hooking out 
into the loch, yet it has a fascinating interest from its 
connection with Scott's " Lady of the Lake," and the 
spot itself is delightful. Southward the giant Ben 
Venue loomed skyward in treeless heather, and slopes 
of emerald turf, and outcropping crags of gray rock. 
Behind me were woods where the birds sang and where 
the sunshine glinted irregularly through the leafage to 
the green undergrowth of grasses and bracken. The 
day was warm and quiet, with a sky of cloudless blue. 
Only enough wind stirred to make the leaves whisper 
and the pendant branches of the birches sway, and to 
keep a pleasant rippling of little waves along the 
shore. 

Not far away was the Isle of the Lady of the Lake, 



154 The Land of Heather 

rising above the water in a rocky knoll, wholly covered 
with trees, just as Scott described it — 

. . . . *' all so close with copse- wood bound. 
Nor track nor pathway might declare 
That human foot frequented there." 

Of course the poet drew freely on his imagination in 
telling the story, and yet it is not at all unlikely that 

** Here, for retreat in dangerous hour. 
Some chief had framed a rustic bower ; ' ' 

for the situation of the isle well accords with such 
use; the old Celtic chieftains, their lives continually 
exposed to peril, were accustomed to have a secret 
domicile ready in as strong and easily defended a spot 
of the most retired part of their domains as could be 
selected. It might be a cave, but, more often, a tower 
or rude hut was erected. 

The plot of the poem is not, however, dependent on 
these general possibilities. It has a modicum of 
genuine historic foundation. The facts are these — a 
troop of Cromwell's cavalry had made a raid into the 
Trossachs, and the local Highlanders had carried all 
their most valuable property to this little island in 
Loch Katrine, and left it there in the care of the 
women and children. The soldiery learned of what 
the natives had done, and came to the borders of the 




Loch Katrine and Ben Venue 



Lochs and Bens 155 

lake ; but they could discover no means of getting out 
to the islet. While they were debating the difficulty, 
a trooper with sharper eyes than his fellows noticed a 
boat moored under one of the island cliffs, and he vol- 
unteered to swim across and get it. If they could 
possess themselves of the boat, access to the isle would 
be easy, and they were sure to gain a rich reward of 
plunder. The man was a good swimmer, his progress 
was rapid, and his comrades soon saw him nearing the 
island. But as he was about to set his foot on land, a 
woman armed with a sword appeared and smote off his 
head, and his lifeless body fell back into the water. 
His fellow-soldiers in great dismay and anger vainly 
discharged their guns toward the island, yet none of 
them ventured any further attempt to secure the boat. 
Shortly they withdrew, and left the possessors of the 
islet undisturbed. The name of the woman who by 
her valor saved the refuge from the invaders was 
Helen Stewart, and it was christened in her honor 
Helen's Isle. Fiction, however, has proved more 
powerful than fact, and the island is now much more 
distinctly connected with the name of Ellen Douglas 
than with that of Helen Stewart. 

When I retraced my steps along the borders of the 
loch I found the brisk little steamer fast filling with 
passengers, and soon it cast loose, and we were off for 
the other end of the lake. During the first part of the 



156 The Land of Heather 

journey the shores rose in wooded precipices and the 
mighty Ben Venue looked down from near at hand, 
and, better still, we passed close by the wild little 
Ellen's Isle. Later the country turned milder, and on 
either side were simply great grazing hills, sweeping far 
upward in green, unwooded slopes. 

We arrived at our destination in the course of an 
hour. The steamer was lashed to a pier, and we all hur- 
ried off to get a choice of seats on the three big coaches 
that stood waiting on the near highway. These were 
to take us six miles over the hills to Inversnaid on 
Loch Lomond, and each vehicle had four horses and 
a red-coated driver and liveried footman. The route 
led through a deserted country of heather-clad uplands, 
where the only life was the groups of feeding sheep. 
Presently we began the descent toward Lomond by 
sharp loops of the steepest sort of roadway. The 
brakes were set tight, and scraped and jarred, but the 
horses kept on at a trot, and when the driver swung 
his whip and let the long lash cut through the air, 
they broke into a spurt of galloping. The passengers 
braced their feet and imagined what would happen if 
anything gave way, or if we met a team as we turned 
one of the wooded curves. The drive and these im- 
aginings were the more exhilarating by reason of a 
deep ravine whose precipitous edges were skirted by 
the narrow road for the final mile or two. 



Lochs and Bens 157 

Our journey's end was a steamer wharf at the edge 
of the loch, with a big hotel just up the hill. As the 
coaches came to a standstill two men with bagpipes 
began to march back and forth in front of the hotel, 
playing away with ardor enough for a whole orchestra. 
We were also welcomed by three bareheaded gypsies 
— a frouzy woman and two girls, — each of whom 
accosted such of the travellers as they could waylay 
with the words, " Please gie me a penny, sir, to buy a 
cup o* tea wi', sir," in the most plaintive of tones. 

Rob Roy, that most noted of outlaws since Robin 
Hood, owned property in Inversnaid, and had a cave 
not far away to the north on the border of the lake, 
where he sometimes took refuge when hard pressed. 
All the region around is full of associations with this 
wild chieftain. Mediae valism was not extinct in the 
Highlands until the middle of the eighteenth century, 
and Rob Roy flourished here less than two hundred 
years ago. He was born about 1660, in Glen Gyle, 
at the head of Loch Katrine ; and in Balquidder, 
a little farther north, he lies buried, and his gravestone, 
with a sword roughly carved on it, can be seen there in 
the churchyard. 

He was of the hardy, unruly clan of the Macgregors, 
whose very name was outlawed so that its members 
were obliged to add some other appellation. Thus 
Rob Roy's full name was Robert Macgregor Camp- 



158 The Land of Heather 

bell. Roy, meaning red, was simply a nickname 
suggested by the color of his hair and his ruddy 
complexion. In person he was unusually strong and 
compact, with great breadth of shoulders and very long 
arms, and he was a master in the use of the Highland 
sword. But, more potent as a safeguard than bodily 
strength or skill with weapons, was his intimate knowl- 
edge of all the recesses of the rough country in which 
he harbored. This was admirably suited to his pur- 
poses. It was broken up into narrow valleys, and the 
habitable parts bore no proportion to the huge wilder- 
nesses of forest, rocks, and bogs by which they were 
encircled. A few men acquainted with the ground 
and well led were capable of baffling the pursuit of 
numbers. 

Rob was not always an outlaw, and for a consider- 
able period was favorably known as a dealer in cattle. 
No lowland or English drovers in those days would 
venture into the roadless northern hills and mountains, 
and the cattle, which were the staple commodity of the 
uplands, were driven down to border fairs by parties of 
Highlanders with their arms rattling about them. Dis- 
putes and fights sometimes occurred ; but in the main 
the trading was done peaceably and in all honor and 
good faith. While engaged in this cattle traffic in 
early manhood Rob Roy became a trusted agent in 
purchase and sales for his powerful neighbor, the 




Q 

o 
o 

o 

X 

< 
o 
U 



Lochs and Bens 159 

Duke of Montrose. He maintained herds of his own 
in a glen north of Loch Lomond ; and because he 
often suffered loss from marauders dwelling among 
the hills still more to the north, he organized a com- 
pany of armed men. He not only protected his own 
flocks, but those of all the dwellers in his vicinity, for 
which service he levied a tax. At length came a time 
when, through unfortunate speculations and the dis- 
honesty of a partner, he was rendered totally insolvent, 
and the Duke of Montrose, to whom he was deeply in 
debt, seized his estates. 

Rob himself got away and collected a band of 
twenty followers. Then he proceeded to annoy, by 
every means in his power, the duke, and all that 
nobleman's tenants, friends, alHes, and relatives. But 
Rob did not confine his attentions to them. Under 
one pretence or another he raided all his neighbors 
of the lowlands who had anything to lose, unless they 
bought security by an annual payment. In spite of 
his calling he was after a manner benevolent and 
humane rather than cruel and ferocious. He avoided 
bloodshed as much as possible, and was liberal in 
relieving the poor, of whom there was no lack, owing 
largely to Rob Roy himself and other depredators 
of his kind ; for the lawlessness of the region discour- 
aged industry, and there was little culture of the 
ground and no manufactures or trade. 



i6o The Land of Heather 

The robber chief never stirred without a body- 
guard of ten or twelve picked followers, and when he 
chose he increased this number to fifty or sixty. He 
rarely had any trouble in eluding or driving off the 
expeditions sent against him, and on the one or two 
occasions when he was captured, he quickly escaped. 
If he suffered any serious damage, he without delay re- 
venged himself. For instance, when his house was 
burned, he made a descent on the factor of the Mon- 
trose family who was on a rent-collecting tour, and car- 
ried off all the money the man had gathered, to the 
last shilling. Rob's usual method, however, of levying 
on the duke's rentals was much more matter-of-fact. 
To a considerable extent the tenants paid in grain, and 
storehouses were established at various points for its 
reception. Rob Roy was in the habit of helping him- 
self to such quantities of grain as he pleased, some- 
times for his own use, sometimes for the assistance of 
needy country people ; but he never failed to give reg- 
ular receipts for what he took, pretending that he was 
going to reimburse the duke for it later. 

As he advanced in years he became more peaceable, 
and the duke, who had found offensive measures ineffec- 
tual, stopped harrying the Macgregors, and to such of 
them as would settle down he gave leases at a low rental. 
The result of the duke's clemency in the case of Rob 
Roy was that toward the close of his life he dwelt un- 




a 
o 

o 

o 

h 
X 

< 
o 
U 



Lochs and Bens i6i 

disturbed under his own roof, and about the year 1733 
he died in his own bed in the parish of Balquidder. 

His temper was not without fire to the very last. 
During his final illness it was announced to him by 
members of his family that a certain person with whom 
he was at enmity had come to visit him. " Raise me 
from my bed," commanded the sick man, " throw my 
plaid around me and bring my claymore and pistols. 
It shall never be said that a foeman saw Rob Roy 
Macgregor defenceless." 

The visitor then entered and made friendly inquiry 
after Rob Roy's health, but the latter maintained a cold, 
haughty civility during the short conference. As soon 
as the caller had gone the old chieftain sank back, 
saying, " Now all is over. Let the piper play, ^ We 
return no more.' " 

The piper played, but before the quavering dirge 
was finished Rob Roy had expired ; and when the 
news of his death spread, his loss was lamented far and 
wide in his own wild district. 

When I prepared to leave Inversnaid, I sought the 
wharf, and looking toward the north saw approaching 
from among the mountains the black hull of a lake 
steamer overhung by a cloud of smoke. The sur- 
rounding scenery was on such a grand scale that the 
craft appeared to be very low and small — just a little 
blot on the waters ; but it proved to be a very good- 



1 62 The Land of Heather 

sized double-decked vessel. Passengers hurried off, 
and other passengers hurried on, the big piles of 
trunks and boxes were rushed aboard, and we went on 
southward. The hills and mountains bordering were 
higher than on Loch Katrine, and much of the time we 
had in view the majestic Ben Lomond rising serenely- 
above all its fellows. On the lower slopes of the 
heights were many gray-green acres of bracken, and in 
the ravines were waterfalls making white leaps down 
the steep declivities. Here and there patches of 
purple heather were coming into blossom, frequent 
woods of evergreen and copses of birch grew along the 
shores and in the little glens that furrowed the hillside, 
while in the lake itself were occasional small islands, 
on which could now and then be gHmpsed a ruin hid- 
ing among the trees. 

The voyage ended at the extreme lower end of the 
lake. Thence I continued a few miles south to Dumbar- 
ton, on the Clyde, where I planned to spend the night. 
A remnant of the day still remained, and after I had 
selected a hotel I went for a walk. Ship-building was 
plainly the chief industry of the place, and along the 
river were the great yards where all day long is to be 
heard the confused clamor of hundreds of hammers 
ringing on the iron hulls of half-built vessels. When 
I got glimpses into the enclosures I saw forests of up- 
right timbers supporting the new vessels, and there 





h 



i 




Lochs and Bens 163 

were black foundries and workshops, tall, smoke- 
plumed chimneys, and an army of mechanics. 

My ramble ended with a visit to the old castle 
perched on a great, rough, double-turreted cliff that 
rose steeply from the level banks of the river; and 
then I started to go back to my hotel. It was later 
than I had thought, and the working people had fin- 
ished their suppers. The men were lounging in door- 
ways or walking the streets, children were playing 
on the pavements, and many frowzled women were 
visiting at the entrance to their houses, or, if it hap- 
pened to be more convenient, in the middle of the 
highway. There was abounding dirt and slovenHness. 
All the poorer children were barefoot, and so were 
many of the women, and it seemed to me that nearly 
every woman, even down to the young girls, had 
either coarse and wrinkled faces or bold and rude 
ones. 

I had just returned to the main street, after threading 
through several of the byways, when I heard a noise 
of many voices and saw a turmoil of people approach- 
ing and filling the thoroughfare Uke a sudden flood. I 
hastened to the protection of a doorway and let the 
mob sweep past. In the front and centre were four 
men carrying a fifth on their shoulders, and the fifth 
man lay apparently lifeless, with a white face falling 
limply to one side. This grewsome vanguard hurried 



164 The Land of Heather 

on, with men, women, and children running after, and 
from every alley poured newcomers, till the whole 
town was alive with people, and I could not but wonder 
how such numbers could get together so quickly. The 
majority followed the injured man, but others gathered 
in excited groups, and all sorts of stories were circu- 
lated as to what the trouble was. One said the man 
had dropped in a faint, another that the bobby 
(policeman) had struck him and laid his head open 
with a club, another that he had been hit in fun by a 
friend. 

Presently I went on, and entered the side street on 
which stood my hotel. To my surprise I found the 
crowds continually getting thicker and more excited. 
A particularly dense and uneasy mob was gathered in 
front of my hotel, and I had difficulty in forcing a way 
through. I was admitted at a side-gate by one of 
the women of the house who was looking out over 
the wicket, and from her I got the full story of the 
disturbance. 

Jacob Primmer, an anti-papist of considerable fame, 
had been lecturing on the common. There were many 
CathoUcs among his hearers, and his denunciations so 
stirred them that they resorted to violence, and the 
orator had to be escorted to his hotel, which happened 
to be the very one I had chosen, in the midst of eleven 
policemen. Sticks and stones were thrown, and a stray 



Lochs and Bens 165 

missile had struck and stunned the man I had seen 
carried along the main street. The mob outside 
thought Primmer would go to the railroad station 
later in the ev^ening, and were waiting to assault him ; 
but he disappointed them by staying at the hotel over 
night. I saw him when I went indoors — a brisk little 
man, getting gray and elderly. He looked harmless 
enough, and he seemed in no wise disconcerted by the 
riot he had brought about his ears. 

It was not very agreeable stopping in a house 
beleaguered as mine was, but it was an interesting 
experience. The sounds that came from the street 
reminded me of the angry hum one hears within a 
beehive when it is given a disturbing rap. For an 
hour or so the crowd hung on, and then a street 
musician came along and played a merry tune on an 
accordion. That was a great help toward a peaceful 
dispersion, and I am inclined to think a good dose of 
pleasant melody would have a quieting effect on any 
mob. 

The next morning I returned to Loch Lomond and 
sailed northward the full length of the lake. The 
steamer was thronged, and the day sunny. The men 
smoked, and the women read and chatted. At the 
piers, everywhere we stopped, buses and coaches and 
parties of pleasure-seekers were waiting, and each time 
as soon as we got under way again a boy made the 



1 66 The Land of Heather 

rounds of the deck with a basketful of guides, souvenirs, 
and photographs for sale. 

At the head of the lake I exchanged the steamer for 
the railway, and by noon reached Dalmally, not far 
from another of the famous Scotch lochs with its 
attendant mountains. A visit to this loch was the 
pleasantest feature of my stay at Dalmally. It was 
four miles distant, a comfortable walk down a wide 
valley on a road that much of the way kept company 
with a httle river lingering through drowsy lowlands. 
Though it was not yet mid-August, all the greens of 
woods and fields were lightened in the early morning 
of the day I walked to Loch Awe by a heavy white 
frost, and when the sun began to get high, the beech 
leaves shrivelled at their tips and looked scorched ; 
but except for this I did not observe that the frost did 
any special harm. In time I sighted the lake bask- 
ing in blue serenity beneath the quiet summer sky. 
Wandering breezes rippled its surface here and there 
into silver, and, well out in the midst, a lazy rowboat 
was paddling back and forth, its occupants intent on 
fishing. But what attracted the eye most was the 
beautiful ruin of Kilchurn castle. Its half- fallen walls 
rose above a little grove of attendant trees, and in the 
background was a lofty tumble of mountain ranges, 
with Ben Cruachan monarch of the peaks. The old 
castle was a gem, and I promptly turned my footsteps 



Lochs and Bens 167 

in its direction. It lay beyond a long stretch of marshy 
meadows where a group of men and women were at 
work haymaking. 

I approached the ruin, expecting to find it wholly 
forsaken to nature, and was a good deal surprised to 
come on a bevy of hens and chickens picking about 
under its walls, and to discover that the entrance was 
barred by a heavy oak door. On the door was a Httle 
sign, " Ring the bell," and I pulled a cord that dangled 
down close by. Soon I heard footsteps. The door was 
opened, and a middle-aged woman admitted me to the 
castle. As soon as I crossed the threshold I found 
myself in an ancient earthen-floored dungeon with a 
vaulted roof, for the entrance here was one cut through 
in recent years. The woman keeper of the fortress 
did not live in the ruin, but in an ivied cottage that 
had been built in a green court of the castle interior. 
There it was nestling under the old walls, with its chim- 
ney cheerfully smoking and giving a pleasant domestic 
touch to the historic ruin. 

I explored the castle thoroughly, climbed its towers, 
followed its walls, looked up its cavernous chimneys ; 
and then a shower came trailing down from Ben Crua- 
chan. From the parapet of the fortress I saw the 
new-starting streams glisten in the high ravines of the 
mountain, and I watched them grow and glide with 
frequent foamy tumbles down the slopes. When the 



1 68 The Land of Heather 

shower struck the castle, I sought the dungeon at the 
entrance, opened the oaken door for the sake of light, 
and sat there looking out on the flying rain. The 
hens sidled up to the doorway from the coops under 
the near bushes and studied their chances for stealing 
into the apartment ; but I blocked the way, and they 
sank discouraged heads between their shoulders, and 
stood just outside, with the water sliding in httle rills 
off their tail-feathers. Tricklings from the rain above 
came down plentifully into the dungeon, and the fur- 
rows in the hard earth underfoot showed that in heavy 
downpours the streams must have run in small tor- 
rents clear across the sloping floor and out beneath 
the entrance door. 

I might have found the dungeon a trifle tiresome, 
but the lady of the castle came to my rehef and enter- 
tained me with some ancient lore of the region. There 
was a time, she said, when there was no Loch Awe at 
all — only a deep valley. In those days a race of 
giants inhabited the land, and the vale was filled with 
their flocks. Their home was on the lofty heights of 
Ben Cruachan, and they spent much of their time in 
hunting over the hills. In the valley was a spring 
which was mysteriously connected with the destinies of 
the giants, and it was their sacred duty neither to allow 
the last ray of the sun at eventide nor its first gleam 
in the morning to touch the water. To prevent this a 



Lochs and Bens 169 

large stone was laid over the fountain just before sun- 
set, and this was on no account removed until after 
sunrise the next morning. 

For ages the spring was faithfully guarded ; but the 
race gradually dwindled until only one remained to 
perform the task — a giantess of such mighty stature 
that she could step from the summit of one mountain 
to that of another at a single stride. One afternoon in 
the heat of midsummer, after a fatiguing day's hunt, 
she sat down to rest for a little. She recollected that 
she must soon descend into the valley to cover the 
spring, but the sun was high in the heavens, and there 
was no need of haste. Unfortunately, she fell asleep, 
and did not awake until the following morning. It 
was broad daylight, yet when the giantess looked about 
her she hardly knew where she was, so changed was 
the scene. A vast sheet of water now filled the vale, 
many of the lesser hills were changed to islands, and 
her flocks were all drowned. Such had been the result 
of leaving the spring uncovered for a single night. 
More than that, as she looked with dismay on the 
destruction she had caused, she felt her strength ebb- 
ing away, and knew she was doomed. In some occult 
manner her life was connected with the spring, and she 
soon lay dead on the high moorland. With her ended 
her race, and Loch Awe remains their sole memorial. 

Another legend was of an island of the loch on 



lyo The Land of Heather 

which was once an enchanted garden more beautiful 
than any other spot on earth. Golden apples hung 
ever fair on its trees, and a frightful dragon watched 
over them. Persons sailing past sometimes caught 
gleams of the golden fruit, and if the boat came at all 
near the isle, those on board were likely to see the 
dragon flapping the air with his tail and opening his enor- 
mous mouth significantly. While the garden on this 
island still bloomed, there lived on the slope of Ben 
Cruachan a fair maiden named Mego. She had every- 
thing a reasonable maiden could wish for, yet she was 
not happy. Nothing would do but she must have 
one of the dragon-guarded golden apples. So she 
ordered Frooch, her lover, to get one for her. 

Frooch foolishly swore to do as she bid, and get the 
apple, dragon or no dragon. Accordingly he swam 
over to the island, and he and the dragon fought until 
the life was belabored out of both of them. Immedi- 
ately the golden apples and the enchanted garden 
vanished, and the island became like other islands. 
As for the maiden, Mego, she pined away and died, 
but whether for lack of the coveted apple or in re- 
morse for the loss of her brave lover, the lady of 
Kilchurn castle could not say. 

The shower was past by the time these tales were 
finished, and I started back toward Dalmally. I 
lingered through the meadows where the tall grasses 



Lochs and Bens 



171 



hung heavy with water drops prismatic in the sunlight, 
and before I knew it, another storm was brewing among 
the mountain peaks, and its mists of falUng rain were 
sweeping high and gray across the western sky. 
Then Httle shreds began to veil the near slopes, 
and, though I hastened, the first drops caught me in 
the open meadows. No house was near, and I ran to 
the protection of a railroad bridge, and sat and waited 
beneath it by the edge of the stream, with my back 
against the stone abutment. The storm was fierce 
while it lasted, but that was not long, and then I took 
the Dalmally road again. 




Loch Lomond and Ben Lomond 



IX 



THE ISLE OF MULL 




w 



HEN I 
left Dal- 
mally my 
destination was 
Oban on the west 
coast. The jour- 
ney was all the way 
through the tum- 
bled ridges of the 
Highlands, a part 
of the time high 
on the sides of the 
bare, rocky hills, 
and again crooking 
along low down in 
the deep valleys. Often these valleys were just nar- 
row defiles that left only room enough for the railway 
track, a cart path, and a stream. The brooks and 
rivers were swift and foamy, and there were many 
fishermen angling from their banks or wading about 

172 



A Cottager piling Peat 



The Isle of.MuU 173 

in their rapid waters. One odd remembrance of the 
trip is of seeing three stalks of Indian corn growing in a 
flower-bed at the edge of the platform of a little way- 
side station. They were no doubt cultivated as semi- 
tropical curiosities, for the cHmate had not heat enough 
to mature ears. 

Oban is a port of some importance, and carries on 
considerable traffic with the northwest coast and the 
outlying islands. It was late in the evening when I 
arrived, and though there were certain steamers still 
coming and going, the day's work was in the main 
done, and I looked out on a peaceful harbor where 
many little rowboats and numbers of larger craft lay 
rocking gently at anchor in the golden twilight. 

I had come hither with intent to visit some of the 
Hebrides. Of the straggling line of isles that make 
up the Inner Hebrides, Mull is one of the largest and 
most easily accessible, and I decided to begin with 
that. It lies directly seaward from Oban, and is in 
plain sight. I only stayed in Oban over night, and 
then embarked on one of the small coasting steamers 
for an island village by the name of Craignure. It 
was a half-hour's journey. As we proceeded the 
island grew more distinct, and I could see that it was 
very rough, everywhere rising into misty mountains, 
some of the highest of which reached in dreamy blue 
far up into cloudland. On the lonely island shores 



174 The Land of Heather 

I now and then saw a house or an old ruin, but as 
a whole the outlook was so deserted and sombre it 
gave me a touch of homesickness. 

I knew nothing of Craignure except that it had 
been recommended to me as picturesque and charac- 
teristic ; and 1 was a good deal disconcerted when the 
captain told me to step down below to disembark. 
That meant Craignure was so minute a place the 
steamer did not go up to a pier, but signalled for 
a rowboat to come out to meet it. I glanced shore- 
ward and saw a few houses dotted along just back 
from the beach, and I could see a boat with two men 
pulling at the oars leaving a small wharf. The steamer 
slowed up and churned the water with the backward 
dashing of its paddles, and when the rowboat ap- 
proached, a rope was thrown to it. The little craft 
swung 'around beside the steamer, and in the stiff wind 
that was blowing it bobbed up and down on the waves 
and bumped against its ponderously swaying compan- 
ion, offering a most uncertain foothold, I thought, as 
I looked out on it. No time was wasted. Two sail- 
ors took me by the arms and jumped me down, my 
luggage followed, and we cast loose and drifted astern. 
The steamer's paddles began to revolve, and the vessel 
was soon far away, while we labored over the waves 
toward the shore. The experience was a new and ex- 
citing one, and made my nerves tingle while it lasted. 




Churning 



The Isle of Mull 



175 



I had been told there was a hotel at Cralgnure, and 
I had seen it from the steamer, stark and stiff, not far 
from where we were to land. It was a humble affair, 
and the sign across its front was so worn and faded as 
to be almost unreadable. I spoke to the boatmen 
about getting my luggage to the hotel, but they in- 
formed me that the building was vacant, and that its 
business had been discontinued for years. 

Then what could I do ? 

Well, they didn't know ; but I might try at " the 
lodge " ; and they explained that all this part of the 
island was owned by a gentleman who had a mansion 
a mile back from the village, and the lodge of which 
they spoke was at the entrance to his park, only a 
short walk from the wharf. The woman living there 
had had some relative stopping with her, and this rela- 
tive was going away that day, and perhaps now she 
could keep me. 

The lodge proved to be a snug little cottage behind 
a fringe' of trees standing just within the gates that 
guarded the entrance to the park driveway. A stout, 
talkative old lady, who had red cheeks, contrasting 
pleasantly with a white, frilled cap, met me at the 
door, and my spirits rose at once when she said her 
relative had gone and I could have his room. I did 
not go inside, but started instead for a ramble that, as 
it happened, occupied nearly all day. 



176 The Land of Heather 

There was little to keep me in Craignure village. 
It consisted of a small church, a white manse, and 
scarcely half a dozen other houses all told, and it was 
so extremely quiet that I was half inclined to think 
that all the inhabitants had departed with the relative 
of the lodge lady. I soon turned away from the vil- 
lage, entered the park, and followed its winding road- 
way back a long distance through woods and opens. 
This brought me in time to a great rusty mansion. 
Near it, where should have been lawn, was a big tur- 
nip field, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, and the 
whole place was overhung with a strange and depress- 
ing air of dilapidation. Had some old tragedy cast 
its blight on the manor, I wondered, or was it the 
home of an unfortunate member of the gentry who 
was bankrupt ? 

I kept on past the mansion, and made a detour 
to get around an arm of the sea that stretched far in- 
land ; and a mile or two beyond that I came to a 
ruined castle on a cliff of the wild shore. It was a 
gloomy old wreck of mediaeval grandeur, and appealed 
strongly to the imagination, and yet I was more inter- 
ested in a cottage I visited close at hand. This cottage 
had a thatched roof and thick, low walls of stone, laid, 
not in mortar, but simply chinked with peaty turf In 
one end of the dwelling lived a harmlessly insane man 
and his sister, in the other end a lone old woman ; 



The Isle of Mull 



77 



though the entire structure was no larger than a mod- 
erate sized one-story ell of an American farmhouse. 

By the side of a slender path leading down to a 
spring in a near hollow was a tiny garden barely two 
yards square. Here I found the old woman at work ; 
but when I questioned her about the house interior, 
she desisted and led the way to the door at her end. 
The door gave entrance to a dark apartment where she 
stored her peats. It was unfinished and windowless, 
and open to the crooked sticks and thatch of the roof. 
Adjoining it was the smallest living room I had ever 
seen — about twelve feet by six, and just high enough 
for a man of medium height to stand upright under 
the boards of the loft above. To pass beneath the 
supports of this upper floor, stooping was a necessity. 
A small fireplace jutted out into the room, and a bed, 
on which two cats were dozing, reached clear across 
the far end. There were chairs and stools, a table, 
a stand, and some meagre shelves of crockery, so that 
very little floor space was left. Picture papers were 
pasted plentifully over the walls to make the apart- 
ment warmer as well as more beautiful, and a diminu- 
tive window furnished light. The occupant had 
reached the age of eighty, she said, and she had an 
allowance from the parish, but in the main she paid 
her own way by hiring out to work in the fields. 

I noticed when I left the ancient cottage that the 



lyS The Land of Heather 

weather had turned more threatening. The mountain 
tops were hooded with mists, and these mists crept 
lower and lower down the ridges, until presently it 
began to rain. Not far away was a farmhouse, and I 
turned aside and hastened to it by a rough cart road, 
and rapped at the entrance to the kitchen. A woman 
responded, but when she saw I was a stranger, begged 
me to go around into the garden to the front door. 
There I was met and ushered into the best room. I 
explained how I happened to make this unexpected 
call, and the woman, with hospitable zeal, insisted that 
I must have some refreshment, and stepped out to pre- 
pare it. 

While she was gone I looked about me. It was a 
stiff sort of room that I was in, apparently only in- 
vaded in housecleaning time, and on such special occa- 
sions as the present. The wall-paper was of an 
antiquated stripe, and the pictures were very old-fash- 
ioned, and included a sampler. Around the edges of 
the room a dozen or more chairs were arranged in 
frigid order, each with a tidy on its back. In one 
corner was a piano, and on a table were a variety of 
photographs and a few books. 

The woman soon returned, bearing a tray loaded 
with scones, butter, jelly, a pitcher of new milk, and 
a pot of tea. She had changed her gown, meantime, 
and had run down to the hayfield and called in her 



The Isle of Mull 179 

brothers, Hugh and John. They were now in the 
kitchen making themselves presentable ; but in a few 
minutes they came to the parlor. I stayed fully two 
hours, and these farm-folk never flagged in their kindly 
attentions, and gave up nearly the whole time to mak- 
ing things pleasant for me. They could not have 
done more had I been a friend of a lifetime ; and they 
expressed the wish that I had come to Kilpatrick Farm 
to stay instead of stopping at the lodge, adding that 
they could have made me very bean (comfortable). 
They told me about the photographs on the table and 
the pictures on the wall, and John stood in a chair and 
took down the sampler that I might see it closer. The 
woman said it was worked by a sister who went to 
boarding-school, and she pointed out on it the initials 
of her parents and their twelve children, and told me 
all their names. 

By and by my entertainers made a tour of the 
premises for my benefit. In the kitchen a fire of peats 
was burning in a rude little stove. Until compara- 
tively recently they had used the wide fireplace, but it 
had no grate and smoked horribly, and so they bought 
the little stove. They wanted the proprietor to attend 
to the chimney and put in a range, but he would not, 
nor would he do aught to better their ceiling, which 
was black with soot and cracking off all over in minute 
flakes. This landlord, I learned from others, did not 



i8o The Land of Heather 

take much interest in Mull farming. He was a mil- 
lionnaire, a keen business man who had made a good 
deal of money by his own efforts and gathered more 
to himself by marrying a titled lady twelve years his 
elder. In spite of his wealth he was a stickler for 
economy, and would pick up empty match boxes on 
the London streets, and he exacted his dues to the 
last halfpenny. Yet if anything took his fancy, he 
thought nothing of paying a thousand pounds for it. 
Hugh said the landlord had a fine mansion in London, 
and that this one in Mull was no more than a hen- 
house to that. 

In the Kilpatrick Farm kitchen, the floor was of 
flat stones, all marked in a curious scroll-like pattern 
that covered them with a network of curling lines. 
This marking was renewed regularly every Friday 
by the woman, who would get down on her knees 
and scratch the pattern in with a sharp piece of soap- 
stone. The decorative ornamentation of the floor was 
of course not very permanent, yet it lasted fairly distinct 
over Sunday. At one side of the room hung a " wag at 
the wa' " clock, with its weights and pendulum exposed, 
and near by stood a dresser full of old-time pewter and 
crockery. The woman said she would show me a bag 
of seaweed she had in the pantry — seaweed of a sort 
they used a great deal in making puddings. But she 
forgot that in the pantry she had prisoned a hen and 




A Kitchen Corner 



The Isle of Mull i8i 

twenty chickens. This family came running out when 
the door was opened, and the woman drove them on 
through the kitchen and scullery into the yard. The 
seaweed proved to be Iceland moss. They pulled it 
on the shore in summer at low water, brought it to the 
house in creels, and spread it on the grass for about a 
month to bleach and dry. They always gathered 
enough so that they could put away a bushel-bag full 
of the shrunken product for the year's use. 

They had to depend very much on themselves for 
the food they ate. No grocer's or baker's cart ever 
visited them, and no " jflesher " with " dead meat." To 
a considerable extent the sea was their larder. The 
stalwart brothers often went fishing of an evening, and 
they would easily catch a hundred apiece, and some- 
times between them brought home half a thousand. 
A part of the catch they. ate fresh, a part they salted 
for winter, and a part they fed to the pigs. They did 
not think much of fish as a food for human beings. 

The doors were open from the kitchen through the 
scullery into the dairy, and I was invited to step into 
the last named apartment and look about. It had a 
stone floor, and its one window was much shadowed 
by ivy, so that it must have been dark and cool in the 
warmest weather. On the shelves were rows of heavy 
pans full of milk, a tall earthen crock for cream, and 
several wooden firkins packed with butter. Lastly, 



1 82 The Land of Heather 

there was a wooden churn of the slim, upright type, 
broad at the bottom and small at the top, with a long 
handle that worked up and down. The dairy was 
dean and wholesome, and the farm folk said their 
butter always took first prize at the fairs. 

Not only did my hosts show their house, but they 
took me to the barn and byres. The inspection 
ended with the barn loft. Here was not much just 
then save high-piled bags of meat (grain) for the cattle, 
protected by an occasional clumsy trap set for rats, and 
the loft*s chief claim to interest lay in the fact that 
years ago the people of the neighborhood frequently 
used it for a ballroom. On such occasions it was all 
trimmed with evergreens, and lit with " paraffine " 
lamps ; there was music of harps, pipes, and fiddles, 
and they had very merry times. But they never had 
such gatherings now. There was no one to come to 
them. Formerly nearly twoscore crofters had their 
homes right on Kilpatrick Farm, and all of them had 
large families. To-day there was not a single croft 
family left. 

In a corner of the barn loft lay a heavy round stone, 
something like a cheese, with a hole in the middle. 
Hugh explained that it was the upper half of an ancient 
grinding stone, a relic of the days when the old wives 
ground their own oatmeal by hand. He had seen 
them do it when he was a lad, and they did it yet in 



The Isle of Mull 183 

the remote Highlands. If the supply of meal ran low, 
the woman would bring in a measure of oats, dry them 
in a pot over the fire, grind them, and make the flour 
into cakes, all within two or three hours. He had 
seen butter made in a bottle, too. One day, while in 
another part of the island, he had stopped at a cottage, 
and a woman in the kitchen was shaking something 
white in a black bottle, and she said it was cream. 
The bottle method of churning is adopted by crofters 
who do not usually make butter, and who take this 
way of providing a little for expected company or for 
a family treat. 

My entertainers used excellent English in convers- 
ing with me, but ordinarily they talked the Gaehc, 
which is the common language of the island, and 
which they considered, as compared with English, 
decidedly finer and more expressive. When I inti- 
mated that I must be getting back to my lodging- 
place, they insisted I should lunch again, and after 
that they escorted me out the front door as far as the 
gate, and the woman picked me a bouquet from her 
flower garden. At the final handshaking they begged 
me to write from America to assure them that I reached 
home safe. From the end of the lane I looked back 
and saw the three standing beside the garden gate 
watching me out of sight, and I went on with a heart 
warmed by their hospitality more than I can tell. 



184 The Land of Heather 

It began to rain again by the time I reached the 
lodge, and evening came early, with a steady down- 
pour. I sat in the best room next a diamond-paned 
bay-window that had a wide sill set full of potted 
plants. The rain pattered on roof and roadway, and 
rustled through the leaves of the trees, and I heard 
the low roar of the sea pounding along the shore. 
For a time I had the company of my landlady, who 
talked with hardly an interruption until her work took 
her to the kitchen. Then her husband came in — a 
withered ancient who was as reticent as she was garru- 
lous. He soon adjourned to the kitchen, and I saw 
him no more. The wife, as she stepped around, 
busied with her evening tasks, groaned at frequent 
intervals, and she had a most distressing way of saying, 
" Oh dear ! Oh dear ! " over and over again. She had 
lumbago and stomach trouble, she informed me, and 
things were always very bad with her in stormy 
weather. She had been saying yesterday that to-day 
would be rainy, and her husband had thought it 
would be fair — he could see well enough now that 
she knew best ! Perhaps next time he would take her 
word when she told him things would be thus and so ] 
But it was just like a man to think he knew all there 
was to know ! 

When I looked out next morning the clouds still 
hung low and threatening, but the rain had ceased, and 



The Isle of Mull 



185 



I early prepared to go out to the steamer that would 
take me away. A brisk wind blew, and the waves were 
crested with whitecaps, and dashed into high-leaping 
spray along the rocky shore. The rowboat careened 
and bounded finely when it got beyond the cover of 
the pier, but the embarking was safely accomplished, 
and the spice of adventure which it furnished was not 
by any means the least agreeable feature of the day 
spent on this far-away Scotch island. 



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An Old Farmhouse 



THE CROFTERS OF SKYE 




A Fire on the Floor 



I WAS not re- 
turning to 
Oban. On 
the contrary I had 
taken a steamer 
bound northward 
for the Isle of 
Skye. The dis- 
tance was only 
seventy-five miles 
in a direct line, 
yet our irregular 
cruising made it an 
all-day's journey. 
We zigzagged 
back and forth 
interminably be- 
tween the islands 
and the mainland, 
and stopped at 
every tiniest sea- 



i86 



The Crofters of Skye 187 

side village. At the larger places we entered a harbor 
and tied to a pier, but oftenest we simply slowed up 
in the offing and were met by a rowboat. Every one 
on board watched the transfer of passengers from the 
panting, slow-heaving steamer to the wave-tossed 
smaller craft with keen interest. No mishaps occurred, 
yet there was always a decided flavor of excitement and 
danger. 

Many ducks were afloat on the billows in groups 
here and there, but at our approach would make hasty 
dives from sight. Multitudes of gulls, too, were bob- 
bing on the waves, and other multitudes were sitting 
on the low rocks at the water's edge or were idling 
about in the air. Sometimes a whole flock of them 
would be startled to wing from the sea or shore, and 
there would be so many that they formed a white 
cloud. 

Now and then we passed a lighthouse or met a 
steamer, or had a sailing vessel or two within our 
horizon, but the prevailing impression was one of 
loneliness. The coast was rarely if ever lost to sight. 
Much of it rose in high, rugged cliflfs, gray and worn 
with the unending struggle with the elements, and 
everywhere inland were great, dark hills lifting often 
into dim mountains whose higher peaks were hidden 
by the clouds. Villages were few and far between, 
and even neighborless single habitations were infre- 



1 88 The Land of Heather 

quent. Most of the homes were low, earth-hngging 
thatched cottages, with walls of dark stone that made 
the whole structure the same sombre color as the 
landscape. 

Of the islands we passed I think I regarded Eigg 
with greatest interest, for there, long ago, was enacted 
one of the grimmest of old-time tragedies. It was 
an incident in the warring of the local clans. The 
Macleods of Skye had made a successful descent on 
the island, and all the inhabitants, numbering two 
hundred, were driven into a big cave near the 
shore. Then the savage invaders built fires at the 
mouth of the cave, and those within were suffocated 
by the smoke, and not one escaped the cruel death. 

I went " steerage." But steerage on a little coasting 
steamer is very different from what it is on an ocean 
greyhound. One would have crowded quarters and 
the company of the scum of the earth on a trans- 
atlantic steamer, while here there was abundant room, 
and the peasantry and tradespeople who were my fellow- 
voyagers were in no wise untidy or offensive. I was 
really quite comfortable, in spite of being excluded 
from the upper deck and from the cabin at the stern. 

The person among the passengers with whom I be- 
came best acquainted was a heavy, talkative old man. 
He said he was a native of Skye, and when that island 
hove into sight he was rapturous. 



The Crofters of Skye 189 

" Skye Is not a place of dear prices," he declared. 
"It's not like Oban. Aha! There they skin the 
nose off you with their prices. But Skye — Skye is 
a fine place to live — good fishing — it's healthy — 
beautiful water for drinking, not the like of it in this 
wide world ; and there's no such scenery anywhere 
else in Scotland. You want to see the Coolin Hills. 
But you'll have to have stouter shoes than those 
you're wearing, if you're going tramping there, and 
you'll want thick stockings like these I've got on. 
Feel of 'em. They're stiff — not soft like factory 
goods. They're homespun, same as my clothes. 
Those trousers now, the cloth in 'em's just a blanket, 
only different color, and it washes. When those 
trousers get dirty all you have to do is to put 'em in 
a tub with water and soap and tramp 'em out the 
way they do blankets. 

" Do you see the tips of some hills 'way off ahead ? 
Some of the mountains back in there are black — black 
as the old Nick ! There's a church over on the other 
shore of that bay we're passing. I know the minister. 
He got married lately, and I saw his wife when I 
was there last month. Aha ! They're a pair of old 
fools. What's the good of people's marrying after 
they get to be sixty ! A man's only getting a nurse 
to take care of him. You get cross by the time you're 
sixty, and ill-tempered, and the dickens is to pay ! 



190 1 he Land or Heather 

In the late afternoon we drew near our destination, 
and the steamer swung around an outjutting of high 
cHfFs into the quiet of Portree harbor, where many- 
little fishing-boats lay softly rising and dipping at 
their anchorage. For a short time our arrival made 
great hurly-burly on the pier, and then things quickly 
subsided to their usual tranquillity. Near by, a squad 
of stout, kerchiefed women were busy packing herring 
in barrels, and a few leathery-visaged fishermen were 
hulking about. Several small boys were dangling 
lines from the wharf or from the boats moored along 
it, and were catching fish from the clear, green sea- 
water as fast as they could pull them in. I would 
have liked to Hnger had the neighborhood been less 
odorous. As it was, I soon went up to the town and 
sought out a lodging-place. 

Portree is the commercial centre of the island, and 
though its people number only about a thousand, it 
boasts of five hotels, as many churches, and three 
banks. A large, modern-looking school-building 
stands on the outskirts, and a courthouse and jail 
front on the open square in the town centre. The 
jail was empty at the time of my visit, as indeed it 
is usually, for the islanders are uncommonly peaceable 
and law-abiding. 

The town is built in a thin crescent on the steep 
hillside that encloses the harbor. The houses of the 



The Crofters of Skye 191 

better class are as a rule comfortablej but rather bare. 
Two stories is the customary height, yet the dwelling 
is often confined to the upper floor, and the lower 
used for a shop. In a few instances there are houses 
sufficiently aristocratic to have space about them re- 
served for a yard with lawn and flowers, and a little 
out from the village are one or two gentlemen's places 
that boast a bit of park. On the other hand, many 
low whitewashed cottages are included within the 
village precincts, and a few old thatched hovels. 

In one aspect the place is pecuHarly rural. Many 
of the householders keep cows, and at nightfall the 
creatures are driven in from the outlying pastures 
straight through the town streets to the byres behind 
the dweUings. It seemed odd to see cows so much 
at home in a place that had three banks and five 
churches. Aside from tradespeople, the inhabitants 
were mainly fishermen, and the brown-sailed herring- 
boats put out from the harbor at noon, or eight o'clock 
every evening, to drag their nets all night. I would 
see them as they came sailing back in the early morn- 
ing, and if I visited the wharf a little later, would find 
the crews busy shaking the shining treasure from the 
nets into the bottom of the boats, whence they after- 
ward shovelled the fish into baskets and set them 
ashore. 

Coal brought from the mainland is burned in most 



192 The Land of Heather 

of the homes, but the poorer folk use peat cut in the 
island bogs. There is a daily mail, and with the 
arrival of this in the evening the people get the news- 
papers published that morning in Edinburgh. Portree 
does not lack in culture, as is witnessed by a village 
improvement society, a literary club whose members 
prepare and read original essays, and a library club 
supported by a yearly membership fee of half a crown. 
The number of volumes owned by the library club 
is gradually but steadily increasing. At present it is 
about three hundred. Private libraries are owned in 
several homes, and an occasional piano is possessed 
among the well-to-do. 

Two roads lead away from Portree to other parts 
of the island, one across it westerly to a village named 
Uig, another to the town of Bradford on the south- 
east coast. From these main highways numerous 
bridle-paths branch off to the scattered island hamlets. 
A few trees grew about Portree, and patches of dwarfed 
and twisted birches make a doubtful struggle for exist- 
ence in some of the moorland hollows ; but otherwise 
the country is one of great, bare, wind-swept hills, over- 
spread with a minghng of grass, bracken, heather, and 
wild flowers. Pools with the peat stain in them 
mottle the boglands, rude outcroppings of rock break 
through the soil of the slopes, and the mountains are 
stony crags that look as if the storms had washed 



The Crofters of Skye 193 

away every vestige of green life and every grain of 
soil. The streams course noisily down from the 
heights with many a foaming waterfall, and in the 
lower valleys they run through wide wastes of boulders 
and pebbles, the wreckage of frequent fierce floods. 
A day seldom passes with no rainfall, for the climate 
is exceedingly moist. Yet the Isle is nevertheless 
healthy, and the average longevity is remarkably high. 
It does not suffer from extreme cold in the Vv^inter, as 
one might imagine it would from its northerly situa- 
tion. Little snow falls, and the season is chiefly char- 
acterized by incessant fogs and showers. 

The inhabitants number less than seventeen thou- 
sand, and there are fewer of them every year. This 
decline has gone steadily on since 1 840, when there were 
nearly half as many again as there are now. It is a 
land of crofters, and the crofters everywhere in Scot- 
land have suffered in the last fifty years. They make 
up the large majority of the Skye inhabitants, yet they 
control only a small part of the land. Three-fourths 
of the island is occupied by twenty-nine large grazing 
farms. On the hills are pastured the farm sheep, and 
in the glens are pastured the cattle. It needs few peo- 
ple to care for them, and the shepherds, ploughmen, 
and servants on each farm will aggregate perhaps eight 
families. The friends of the crofters believe these large 
farms should be cut up, and they affirm that the land 



194 



The Land of Heather 



could support comfortably in small holdings five- or 
ten times as many families as it does now. A hundred 
years ago the people had more stock on the moors, 
they owned a much greater number of horses, they 
lived in better and larger houses, and there were some 
hoards of money. When sheep-farming came into 
vogue, the crofters had to move and huddle in little 
moorland villages, their savings were wiped out, and 
the hovels they were able to build for homes were very 
poor affairs. Many of them are not self-supporting 
as things are at present. Rents to a very large extent 
are paid by sons and daughters who have gone to the 
mainland to work. There are Skye lads and lassies 
in all the large Scotch cities, and a Portree tradesman 
visiting Oban or Glasgow is sure to meet some of 
them, and is equally sure to be made the bearer of 
money and other presents to the old folks on the 
home crofts. 

Agitation in behalf of the crofters has been going 
on for many years, and in 1895 they were given the 
right to have their rents fixed by a commission once 
in seven years. The immediate effect of this in Skye 
was to reduce the croft rents forty per cent. The great 
trouble now is the lack of liberty to acquire large hold- 
ings. Another trouble is with the proprietors. About 
twelve men own the whole island, and nearly all of the 
twelve live elsewhere. Only a very small proportion 




Feeding the Dog 



The Crofters of Skye 195 

of the rentals is spent in Skye itself, which is thus 
simply drained of whatever wealth it produces. The 
gentry themselves are poverty-stricken through their 
own extravagance, as are the Highland chiefs in gen- 
eral. They are educated in the south, and prefer to 
live there where they " stick out their chests " and try 
to emulate the style of the English aristocracy, a thing 
which with their comparatively small income keeps 
them chronically bankrupt. Perhaps the worst phase 
of the matter is the slight thought and attention they 
give to their tenantry, who suffer from the want of 
sympathetic and intelligent oversight. 

The crofters pay yearly rentals of from one to fif- 
teen pounds. This is simply ground-rent, for they 
themselves erect and own the houses in which they 
live. On the smaller crofts there is only an acre or so 
under cultivation, and this is dug over by hand. A 
crofter, however, who pays a rental above five pounds 
is pretty sure to have horses and a plough. Some of 
them have as much as ten acres under cultivation. 
But few comprehend the philosophy of crop rotation, 
and through this ignorance the fertihty of the land is 
destroyed. 

The average crofter keeps a cow and a calf, a small 
flock of hens, and a number of sheep. He raises a 
patch of oats, grows a Httle field of hay and a few 
square rods of potatoes ; and he has the privilege of 



196 The Land of Heather 

cutting peat on the bog. Oat cakes, fish, potatoes, and 
milk are the standard foods, with tea, tobacco, and snuff 
among the necessary luxuries. Ordinarily the cows are 
kept in the houses, but a man who has three or four, 
as do the more prosperous crofters, will have a sepa- 
rate byre for them. The cows are extraordinary look- 
ing creatures and seem much more like wild beasts of 
the forest or desert than domestic animals. They are 
short and broad, with long, shaggy hair and enormous 
wide-spreading horns. But their looks belie them, 
for they are entirely peaceable, and the breed is said 
to be a very good one. 

A great deal of the farm labor falls to the lot of the 
women. I saw them helping in the peat bogs and the 
hay-fields, and constantly met them on the roads carry- 
ing heavy burdens on their backs. The crofts were 
most of them far from the highways and distant from 
market. Horses and carts were rare, and the women 
took the place of beasts of burden to a considerable 
extent. At the time of year that I was in Skye they 
were most apt to be loaded with peat, which they car- 
ried in creels strapped to their shoulders. The creels 
were deep, heavy baskets of willow withes woven by 
the peasants themselves, and they had a capacity of 
between one and two bushels. Sometimes it was no 
less than three miles from the peat moss to the croft 
village. In such a case a woman would stop at inter- 



The Crofters of Skye 197 

vals to sit and rest, and she would relieve her shoul- 
ders of the loaded creel by letting it slip back on a 
convenient bank or dyke. Many of the women had 
their knitting along, and when they stopped to rest 
would set their needles flying. 

The garments of the croft women were as a rule 
coarse and ragged, and a colored kerchief did instead 
of a hat, or else they went about with their frouzy 
hair flying unprotected. Occasionally they were bare- 
foot ; but they seldom go without shoes except around 
home. Some, however, when they have to walk a 
long distance carry their shoes in their hands for the 
sake of economy, to save them from wear, and put 
them on just before they reach the journey's end. 
Homespun enters largely into the wearing apparel of 
the crofters, especially of the men. The wool is carded 
and spun in every cottage, and at least one house in 
each village is very certain to have a loom in the kitchen 
on which is woven the cloth for the neighborhood. 

The life of the crofters is, as a whole, sober-hued and 
laborious ; and although there are times of recreation, 
care-free enjoyment and self-forgetting gayety are sel- 
dom attained. Of the peasant pleasures, I think wed- 
dings, funerals, and the semi-annual communions are 
chief These mean much more than in most places, 
because of the island's isolation. Some of the country 
weddings are very picturesque affairs. At the home of 



198 The Land of Heather 

both bride and groom a company is made up, and the 
two bands start to meet at a stated time, each with a 
piper leading off. After they have joined forces they 
proceed to the manse, where the wedding takes place. 
Then they return to the village whence they came, the 
two pipers piping on ahead, the newly married couple 
following, and a straggling company of relatives and 
friends bringing up the rear. As the bride and groom 
are about to enter the door of the house which is to be 
their home, some one standing in readiness breaks an 
oat cake, baked brittle for the purpose, over their heads. 
This is an old charm, supposed to bring the couples an 
after life of prosperity and plenty. The young people 
in the wedding party all scramble for pieces of the 
broken bannock, and they sleep that night with them 
under their pillows, for in their dreams they can discern 
future husbands and wives aided by the presence of 
these bits of bannock just as surely as we in America 
can with similarly disposed pieces of wedding cake. 

The evening of the wedding day is devoted to con- 
viviality, and there are abundant refreshments in the 
shape of sweeties, cakes, and whiskey; and songs are 
sung, and the bagpipes drone ever and anon to lead 
the dance. The humbler wedding parties occasionally 
lack the bagpipes, in which emergency, if no other 
musical instrument is to be had, some one breathes the 
melodies for the dancers through a paper-covered comb. 



The Crofters of Skye 199 

Things are still going full blast at midnight, and not 
infrequently the gray light of dawn is steaHng out of the 
east before the joUification ends. 

Weddings are too few and far between to furnish 
any very material brightness — and the crofters are not 
a merry people. Still, in their way they find an ele- 
ment of holiday recreation in the most solemn occa- 
sion, if it brings a company of them together. For 
this reason even a funeral is not without its modicum 
of welcome. It makes a break in the monotony, and 
it never fails to be largely attended. The people, as 
they arrive, are provided with a sup of whiskey and 
with oat cakes and cheese or other light refreshments. 
After a short service at the house the men form in 
procession to go to the grave. The women remain 
behind. There is no hearse in the island, and the 
coffin, covered with a black cloth, is carried on the 
shoulders of six bearers. The distance is often long 
— sometimes as much as seven or eight miles — and 
the rule is for the men bearing the bier to give place 
to others about three times to a mile. 

Most notable among the events of the Skye year is 
the summer communion season. It begins on a Thurs- 
day and continues through the succeeding Sunday. 
The meetings are held out of doors, and many of 
the throngs which attend are present all four days. 
Curiously enough, the communion season is marked 



200 The Land of Heather 

by a great deal of drunkenness. The crofters in their 
retired villages, from which they journey only rarely 
to the larger places, find the facilities for getting drink 
very limited. Thus, when at home, they seldom taste 
liquor ; but once in the town, even for a reHgious pur- 
pose, the temptation is too much for them. 

With the exception of this backsliding at the time 
of the communion gatherings in the matter of drink, 
the people of Skye observe their religious days with 
great seriousness and decorum. Indeed, their regard 
for the Sabbath seemed to me decidedly puritanic. 
All work ceases, every one attends church, and the in- 
dulgence in any form of amusement is held to be a 
sin. Nothing could have been quieter than was Portree 
in the early hours of the Sunday I was there ; but 
when the little bells of the village churches began to 
ring at a quarter to eleven, there was a change. For 
fifteen minutes the bells kept up an incessant ding- 
dong, and during all this time the town walks were 
noisy with the clack of heavy shoes moving church- 
ward. I joined the throng presently, and wended my 
way to the Free Kirk on the Square. It was a big 
barn of a building, whose lack of decoration without 
was echoed by the plain severity of the interior. A 
large and attentive audience filled the pews. What 
most impressed me about them at first thought was 
their decidedly peaty odor. Evidently many of the 




A Rider 



The Crofters of Skye 201 

worshippers came from the smoky cabins of the 
croftersj though I would not have recognized them as 
belonging to this class by their dress. They were, 
in fact, so well clad as to be quite transformed. I 
learned afterward that the peasants, however poor, 
consider an outfit of modern and presentable Sab- 
bath garments a necessity, and they will sacrifice a 
great deal in other directions rather than do without 
them. 

The Free Kirk service was entirely in Gaelic, and I 
was not much enlightened by what I heard. In front 
of the pulpit sat the precentor, a tall, gray man, who, 
when a psalm was to be sung, stood before us and led 
the singing. He would first read a line in a chanting 
monotone, and then every one would fall in and sing it. 
Then he would read another line, that would be sung, 
and so on to the end of the psalm. The music was 
very simple, and I thought it rather formless — not 
much more than a wailing up and down, with little 
melody that 1 could discover. However, perhaps I 
could not judge, for those pauses between lines must 
have tended to dissipate the melody pretty thoroughly. 
Excepting the precentor, the audience sat during the 
singing, but we all rose and remained standing through 
the prayers. 

The service lasted nearly two hours. In the after- 
noon there was a second service, and in the evening a 



202 The Land of Heather 

third. That of the afternoon was in English, and 
a very different congregation gathered then, largely 
made up of tradespeople, but they had the same 
preacher. A choir sat in front of the pulpit where 
before had been the lonely precentor. I suggested to 
one of the townsmen that an organ would be a still 
farther improvement. But he said that the choir itself 
was a great innovation, and that the large majority of 
the worshippers would decidedly object to an organ. 
I was not surprised, for I had found the piano at my 
lodging-place shut and locked that morning, and had 
been informed by the maid that the landlady objected 
to having it played on Sunday, and I had already 
drawn the conclusion that the sound of a musical 
instrument was an abomination in the ears of the peo- 
ple of Skye on the Sabbath. 

The Scotch national costume was more in fashion 
among the men of Portree than in any town I had 
visited. A number of the young men wore their 
kilts to church, and the leading merchant of the place 
was especially conspicuous in the garb of a Highland 
chieftain. The gay colors, the sporran hanging down 
in front, the jaunty cap, and the bare knees made him 
look quite romantic, while a dirk stuck in his right 
sock gave him a touch of the savage. 

One of the villages of the crofters was built along 
the shore on the borders of Portree. No road led to 



The Crofters of Skye 203 

it, and footpaths served as its only connection with the 
highway a quarter of a mile up the hill. The slope 
between the cottages and the road was cut up into long 
strips, and here the crofters raised their crops. A few 
of the houses were whitewashed, had chimneys, and 
looked fairly comfortable, but most had walls of 
rough stone chinked with earth, and roofs of thatch 
protected from the onslaught of the gales by a criss- 
crossing of cords, or perchance by an old fish-net. 
Frequently the thatch had patches of grass and weeds 
growing on it, and I saw one roof so covered with 
rank herbage that it had the appearance as if the 
house inmates were raising a crop there. Numerous 
families of chickens and ducks were picking about the 
rocks of the beach or scratching out a living in the 
neighborhood of the cottages. Sometimes the hen- 
house would be a dark little hovel hugging the side 
of the cottage, sometimes a boat turned bottom up- 
ward. There was much refuse about the house fronts, 
and the beach was strewn with broken clam shells. A 
narrow, irregular path, just above high-water mark, 
linked the houses together. It was very rough and 
muddy, and it turned aside now and then to approach 
one of the many springs that furnished water for the 
hamlet. The springs were just as nature made them, 
except that they had been rimmed around with a few 
stones to form shallow basins. 



204 The Land of Heather 

The poorer of the croft homes are about as humble 
as they well could be. The floors are of hard- 
packed earth, and the fire is in the middle of the 
kitchen on a rude platform of stones six or eight 
inches high. A hole in the thatch overhead is the 
only apology for a chimney. In replenishing the fire 
the embers are poked together and fresh peats are 
set up on end around the hot coals. A rope or long 
pole fastened up above to the ridgepole reaches down, 
so that pots can be hung over the fire on hooks at its 
lower end. The tea-kettle is kept warm by being set 
on the hot stones a little to one side. Such a kitchen 
has no ceiling, but is open to the rafters and crooked 
stringers of the roof, which are as black as midnight 
with incrustations and hangings of grime and soot. 
The furniture is meagre, cheap, and shaky. There are 
a few chairs that have seen better days and one or two 
low-backed settles that in the idle spells are much 
of the time " full of mens," to quote the expression 
of a peasant woman. The only other prominent fea- 
tures are a chest, a spinning-wheel, and a small un- 
steady dresser with a row or two of dishes displayed 
on its racks. I have seen more ornamentation and 
attention to the amenities of life in some of our 
American barns than in these homes of the crofters. 
They are simply hovels to exist in. 

A number of Hnes run across the kitchen just high 



The Crofters of Skye 205 

enough to miss the heads of persons stepping around 
below. These are used for various domestic purposes, 
but more particularly to hang dried fish on. Win- 
dows in the croft homes are few and small, and it sel- 
dom happens that a room has more than one. The 
door is usually open in mild weather to give the smoke 
an added means of egress, though this does not clear, 
but only mitigates, the heaviness of the atmosphere. 
The vapors of the fire penetrate and saturate every- 
thing. They affect distinctly the household eatables, 
both to taste and smell, and they insinuate themselves 
in every fabric and article of apparel, so that the 
crofters always carry about with them that heavy aroma 
of the peat. Let one of them sit in the kitchen of a 
town residence long enough to have a friendly cup of 
tea with the cook, and the peat flavor is apparent all 
over the house. 

You might think the peasants would get so used to 
the smoke as not to mind it, but this is not the case. 
The women, especially, acknowledge to feeling a sick 
turn when on dull days the smoke lies inside, and it 
is that, not less than the crowded discomfort of the 
interior, which drives them to do so much of their spin- 
ning outside by the house-walls, their knitting on the 
near banks, and their washing in the streams. 

In one of the houses where I stopped an old woman 
showed me photographs of two intelligent-looking 



2o6 The Land of Heather 

young men whom she said were her sons, now in Aus- 
tralia. All her fivQ children had left the island save 
one daughter, a cripple who was then sitting by the 
fire, taking snuff. The old woman was at work card- 
ing wool, and many skeins of yellow yarn were hung 
on the wall behind her. I was having a very agreeable 
visit, but after she had exhibited her treasured photo- 
graphs she put fresh peats on the fire, and the smoke 
became so stifling I hastened to escape. 

This hamlet by the shore was inhabited by folks 
who depended largely on fishing for their subsistence. 
Two miles inland was a more strictly farming com- 
munity which I one day visited. On the way to it I 
met several men leading panniered ponies. They were 
going to Portree to get goods brought by the steamer 
and carry them back into the country. I followed a 
narrow road that wound along over the moors. This 
road had been made only about a year. Previously 
there had been naught but a faintly marked path. 
The village to which I journeyed was a scattering of 
low, thatched huts, so earthy and rough they seemed 
much like boulders of rock sticking up through the 
soil. They were planted at random on the hillsides 
and in the hollows, and the distant view of the crofts, 
with the patchwork of their small fields, was rather 
attractive. 

I went up an almost indistinguishable footway 




Resting on a Dyke 



The Crofters of Skye 207 

through a spongy bog to a house, where a woman was 
making a peatstack in the yard. She had been bring- 
ing the peats from one of the black cuttings on the 
moor, and her heavy creel lay near by on the ground. 
I looked in at the door of the woman's house, and saw 
a cow and a calf in the dusky interior of an apartment 
only separated from the family living-room by a wooden 
partition. 

At the next house an old man, smoking a short pipe, 
and a barefoot woman were sitting talking on a dyke. 
They had not much command of any language save 
the Gaehc, but we managed to hold a broken conver- 
sation. Presently the woman invited me to have a 
glass of milk, and led the way to the house. The 
entrance was at the end, and admitted me first to the 
byre. The footing was not all it should be here, and 
the woman sprinkled down some heather to enable me 
to get safely across the mire to the kitchen beyond. 
The supply of light for this latter room all came from 
a tiny, grime-darkened window in the roof and from 
the distant outer door. It was like being in a cave, 
and for a time I could hardly see. The woman wiped 
clean a place on a settle for me to sit, washed a soiled 
glass, and went into a tiny closet of a bedroom and 
brought out a bowl of milk. The milk was rich but 
peaty, and, in the dirt and gloom of the surroundings, 
not very palatable. 



2o8 The Land of Heather 

The crofters are sadly handicapped by the poverty 
and forlornness of their environment, but they have 
marked natural capability, and many of the young 
people have in other lands achieved wealth and even 
greatness. One influence which helped in the past 
to sharpen the croft wits was what was known as 
the " caly," a sort of open meeting for argument, 
songs, and stories. The " caly " was held in the cot- 
tage living-rooms, one night at one house and another 
night at some other house. The men when they 
came in seated themselves in a circle about the fire. 
The chairman, who was always the man of the house, 
started the evening's entertainment by relating a story 
or experience, or by singing a song. Then each man 
in turn to the right would follow suit. In winter the 
merriment frequently continued all night. Patriotism 
and a martial sentiment were cultivated, and the par- 
ticipants acquired much useful information. But at 
length the ministers began to oppose the caly on the 
ground that there was too strong a tendency to tell 
profane stories, and now the caly is wholly extinct. 

Of the future of the crofters I cannot say from what 
I saw and heard of them that it appears to hold much 
brightness. Nature itself in that remote and barren 
northern island is against them ; yet the law has done 
something of late in alleviating their condition, and 
may do more. Perhaps the most hopeful sign Is the 



The Crofters of Skye 



209 



tendency shown to improve their homes. They are 
abandoning their primeval fireplaces, and building 
chimneys, and some of the more aspiring have plas- 
tered their house-walls and replaced with slate the 
roofs of mouldering thatch. This has awakened a 
spirit of emulation, and many others will follow the 
example set them as soon as they can gather the 
means. 




A Highland Cow 



XI 



A COUNTRY SCHOOL 



I HAD wandered into a high- 
land glen girdled about with 
wild heather-clad ridges. In 
the depths of the valley a little 
river looped its way along, help- 
ing to make fertile the bordering 
farm lands, and the heart of the 
glen with its emerald meadows 
and the silvery ghnt of the stream 
was pleasant to look on ; but the 
region, as a whole, was too tree- 
less to attract, while the brown, 
undulating hills were so sombre as 
to be almost forbidding. It is true 
the district was not without a cer- 
tain rude kind of beauty, and the 
hills had about them a good deal 
of elemental grandeur, yet to live the year through in 
their big, barren presence I fancied must be sobering 
and oppressive, 

2IO 




A Bird's-nest in the 
Hedge 



A Country School 211 

Probably those born among them did not share 
this feeling, for the glen did not lack inhabitants. 
There were farmhouses and now and then the humble 
dwelling of a cotter or a laborer. One would expect 
in a region so lonely that the homes would gather in 
clusters for companionship ; but it was not so here, 
and neighbors were half a mile or more apart. Even 
the schoolhouse, midway on the long valley highway, 
stood sohtary like the rest, and was almost as much 
isolated from neighbors as it was from the great world 
that lay beyond the encompassing hills. 

I entered the glen wholly intent on pushing up the 
valley and enjoying the unfolding of the landscape 
which took on a new aspect with every turn of the 
road. But when I reached the schoolhouse I paused. 
What kind of a school would be kept here, I asked ; 
what sort of a person would the teacher be, and what 
the nature of the scholars ? I turned into the school- 
yard. 

It was a long, narrow yard surrounded by a high 
stone wall. There was some greenness near the road, 
but the grass had been much trampled, and the play- 
ground grew dustier and more gritty as I walked down 
it, till near the school building naught was left but 
bare earth. At that end of the yard stood a pump, 
around which the ground was hardened and worn 
more than anywhere else. This seemed to attest the 



212 The Land of Heather 

great fascination water has for children, both for inter- 
nal thirst and external sport. One would think there 
were lingering impulses in them descended from some 
far-back fishy ancestors. 

The schoolhouse had masonry walls spatterdashed 
with a mixture of whitewash and gravel, and it had 
diamond-paned windows that gave it something the 
look of a tiny church. But this churchly illusion was 
lost in the near view, for then I saw that the master's 
dwelling was joined to it at the back, and that a gate 
in a rear corner of the playground opened on a path 
leading to his house door. 

It was as yet too early in the morning for school to 
begin, and at first I thought the place was deserted ; 
but when I looked inside, I discerned with some diffi- 
culty a little girl at the far end of the schoolroom half 
concealed in the dust raised by a vigorous plying of 
the broom. She had paused when she saw a stranger 
in the doorway. I spoke with her, and learned that 
she was the master's daughter, and then I asked to see 
her father. She said he was down in the meadow by 
the river, and without more ado dropped her broom 
and trotted away, yelHng, to find him. I am afraid 
this little earthquake of a daughter chasing and calling 
for him so vociferously scared the man, for it was 
barely a minute before he came running breathless up 
the hill back of the schoolhouse and jumped through 



A Country School 213 

a gap in the wall as excitedly as if he had been going 
to a fire. I thought he might be disappointed when 
he found only me there, but his haste apparently only 
meant cordiality. Probably a visitor was a rarity to 
be made the most of. 

The master was a little man, rather above forty 
years of age, with a quick and nervous manner that 
was the more pronounced because of his anxiety to 
do the honors of host with credit : and no one could 
have been kinder or have done more to make my stay 
pleasant. By the time I had done introducing myself 
the scholars began to arrive, and presently the master 
put aside his broad-brimmed gray hat and called his 
pupils who were at their games in the dusty yard by 
shouting from the doorway, " Come away, then ! " a 
command which he supplemented with a shrill whistle. 

The schoolroom seemed very small and crowded 
when all the scholars were in. It was lighted by four 
large windows. A continuous desk ran the whole 
length of the west wall, and turning the corner ex- 
tended as far as the master's platform. This desk was 
right against the sides of the room like a long shelf, 
and the children who sat on the backless bench that 
paralleled it faced away from the rest of the school 
toward the wall. To get to their seats on this bench 
the children usually either stepped over or sat down 
and whirled. The boys were some of them very 



214 ^^^ Land of Heather 

acrobatic in getting their heels over the obstructing 
bench. On the other hand, some of the girls went 
to the opposite extreme and waddled mildly over on 
their knees. 

Most of the schoolroom floor space was filled with 
a row of long movable desks, each with an accompany- 
ing bench. The scholars on the rear seat had nothing 
but vacancy to lean against, but the others had a sharp- 
cornered desk at their backs. At the far end of the 
room sat the babies of th-e school — half a dozen little 
innocents on a bench snug against the wall with a row 
of hooks above hung full of hats and cloaks. What 
weary times those little martyrs must have, I thought, 
sitting there with heels dangling in air through the 
long school hours. I could see but one alleviation — 
the bench was against the wall, and if its occupants 
went to sleep and tumbled off, they could not fall 
backwards. 

None of the school furniture had ever been painted, 
and the white plaster of the walls had never been 
papered. The only wall decorations were two large 
squares of blackboard suspended from nails, several 
good-sized maps, and a tonic-sol-fa chart. The room 
was heated by a small fireplace in which peat was 
burned. If they ever had a touch of New England 
weather in their winters, the children were bound to 
suffer. But the master considered the schoolhouse 



* A Country School 215 

on the whole a very good one — certainly it was an 
improvement on the one in which he got his own 
early schooling. That had a floor of dirt, and he de- 
scribed the fascinated interest with which he used to 
watch the angleworms boring up out of the earth in 
school-time. 

I had been somewhat disturbed when I went inside 
the schoolhouse with the master, following the children 
whom he had summoned from their games in the yard, 
to find that the schoolroom was entirely chairless. 
There was not even a chair for the teacher, and I was 
preparing to sit on one of the benches with the 
scholars when he stopped me, and sent a boy to the 
house for a chair. I was curious to learn what he 
himself did for a seat. So far as I observed, he made 
his desk on the platform serve. It was a boxy little 
affair, with a tall bottle of ink and a pile of copy- 
books on the floor underneath. The master had 
several different ways of sitting down on this desk, 
and sometimes he half lay down on it. He was en- 
tirely unconventional. 

The first thing the teacher did, after I had my chair 
and the scholars were in their places, was to say in his 
sudden, explosive way, " Stand, then ! " The children 
stood and repeated the Lord's prayer in unison, and at 
the close the master said, "Sit, then." Usually the 
session began with the singing of a hymn, but the 



2i6 The Land of Heather 

dominie explained that as several of his best singers 
were absent, he did not feel Hke having the singing be- 
fore a stranger. 

At the conclusion of the prayer he asked several 
scholars to repeat certain of the commandments, and 
tell what was meant by them, and the whole hour 
from nine to ten was spent in these and other exer- 
cises of a distinctly religious character. The master 
said it was the hour of " the conscience clause." At- 
tendance was not compulsory, and any parents who 
chose could keep their children out till it was over. 
As a matter of fact, this was a privilege rarely taken 
advantage of On the first four days of the week 
much of the hour was spent in Bible reading, but on 
Friday the time was devoted to studying the Shorter 
Westminster Catechism. 

At ten o'clock the master called off the thirty-six 
names he had on his roll, and then he had his oldest 
class read Sir Walter Scott's poem, " The Battle of 
Flodden." This class of seniors, which the master 
spoke of as "The Sixth Standard" had sat, while 
reciting, in the corner next the platform, with their 
backs against the continuous wall-desk. The reading 
was noteworthy chiefly for its remarkable lack of 
expression. Every child kept the same key of voice 
right through, and only used punctuation marks to 
catch breath. One would think the poem itself con- 



A Country School 217 

veyed no meaning to their minds, and that they were 
simply reciting a list of words. After the reading the 
master put some questions to the class, beginning with, 
" Where is Flodden ? " If the ones questioned hesi- 
tated, he hastened their wits by exclaiming, " Come on, 
now 1 

Besides geographical and historical questions he 
asked meanings of words, had the scholars parse and 
spell, and sometimes called for the Latin derivation of 
a word. When he had doubts as to whether the chil- 
dren were going to answer, he would give a partial 
reply himself, as, for instance, when he asked, " What 
is the meaning of volley ? '* — pause — " What is it, 
Jessie?" — anxious silence which the master breaks 
by saying, " a great many guns " — he lingered over 
every word in the hope that the girl would catch the 
cue — "going off at the same t — " 

" Time," says Jessie, quickly, and that passed for an 
answer. The scholars picked the final word of an 
answer off the master's tongue in that way again and 
again, and he would dwell on the first letter of the 
key-word just as long as he could if the response was 
still delayed, and lean forward in keen anxiety that the 
scholar should not force him to pronounce it all. 
Usually his efforts met with a prompt reward, and he 
could settle back in relief and in pride over his pupils' 
ability. 



21 8 The Land of Heather 

The recitation was brought to an end by the follow- 
ing explanation from the schoolmaster : " King James 
of Scotland," said he, " fought this battle of Flodden 
just to please the Queen of France, and he lost his 
life in it — lost his life to please a woman ! There's 
many a man more has lost his life that same way, hey ? " 

Now the teacher dismissed the senior class and then 
he called out, " Come up, the Fifth Standard." The 
Fifths, having seated themselves in the vacated corner, 
read a prose piece about the Chinese city of Pekin in the 
same meaningless monotone that the preceding class had 
used. One feature of the lesson was a description of " a 
scribe in the street writing a letter for a love-sick swain," 
and when he finished writing it, he had read it aloud to 
the bystanders. " You wouldna care to hae your love 
letters read that way ! " was the master's comment 
to his class. The children smiled as if they thought 
not. 

The scholars who were not in the class reciting 
talked together, walked around the room on errands 
of business or pleasure, and were sometimes mischiev- 
ous and heedlessly noisy. So great was the pande- 
monium that the master had me move my chair closer 
to the reciting class that I might hear them better 
through the din. When there came a sound of wheels 
from the highway every one looked out, and word was 
passed around as to who it was that had driven by. 



A Country School 219 

In the midst of the session the sanitary inspector 
called. He is a government official who comes around 
once or twice a year, calling at every house to see 
whether sinks and drains and other details about build- 
ings that affect health are all right. He looks through 
the rooms upstairs and downstairs, and if people do not 
keep their dwellings in repair, or crowd too many per- 
sons in too few rooms, or if they have stagnant pools 
close about the house, he tells them to alter things. 
The benefits of such oversight when the investigation 
is competent and faithful are obvious, and it would 
seem as if the same sort of supervision in the interests 
of health might well be introduced in our own country. 
The inspector's only comment on the schoolhouse was 
that it leaked wind badly. 

Another interruption was caused by the arrival of a 
cart from down the valley, that carried cakes and sweets. 
One of the girls immediately rose and made a tour of 
the schoolroom, collecting coppers from those who 
wanted some of the toothsome wares they knew were 
to be had from the pedler waiting in the roadway. 
The girl acting as agent for her companions went out, 
did the trading with the man who drove the cart, and 
then hastened back to distribute the goods she had 
bought through the schoolroom. All this made no 
appreciable interruption in the school routine, and was 
plainly prearranged and understood by all parties. 



220 The Land of Heather 

The morning session of school was very long. The 
hour allowed for dinner did not begin till one o'clock, 
and when the master about twelve let the children out 
to play, I signified my intention to leave. But he 
would not hear to it unless I came to the house first 
and had a bottle of ale with him. I agreed, as far as 
going to the house was concerned, but the ale he 
drank himself. In the fear that I had refused because 
ale was not strong enough, he proposed to set out 
whiskey for me, and when that, too, failed to prove a 
basis of good fellowship, he asked his wife to bring a 
glass of milk and a plate of biscuit and cheese. 

We chatted indoors for a time, and then he took me 
into his garden and talked of its various flowers, shrubs, 
and vegetables, and the richness of the heather honey/ 
that his bees made. When at length I said " good-by,'* 
I left him with real regret, his hospitality was so hearty, 
and he was so anxious all through to make my stay 
pleasant. He was an easy-going little man, and his 
teaching was nothing to boast of Indeed, the school 
had the air of a rather disorderly family, and the master 
seemed more like an older child in control than the 
middle-aged man that he was, making teaching in this 
lonely Highland valley his life-work. Still, whatever 
the teacher's faults, his heart was right, and there was 
something about the school and its ways in their un- 
conventional simplicity that attracted one. 



A Country School 



221 



I shall probably never see that out-of-the-way glen 
again, nor ever hear from it, but I shall never forget 
the kindly master and his little white schoolhouse, with 
the big brown hills frowning and glooming down on 
it with every passing cloud-shadow. 






^■^\ 



•i 








A Wee Brig ower a Burnie." 



XII 



THE SABBATH AND THE KIRKS. 



pulpit, 
As t 
one in 



OF the several leading 
religious denomina- 
tions in Scotland, 
that known as the Free Kirk 
possessed for me the greatest 
attraction. I must, however, 
confess I am only familiar 
with religious Scotland as a 
stronghold of Presbyterianism. 
There were three branches of 
this faith — the Established 
Kirk, the 'U.P.'s' or United 
Presbyterians, and the Free 
Kirk. But the last seemed to 
have the most honest inde- 
pendence, vitaHty, and enter- 
prise, and to draw to its 
as a rule, the strongest and most original men. 
ypical a Free Kirk as any which I attended was 
a certain glen of the southern Highlands. The 

222 




A Garden Rose 



The Sabbath and the Kirks 223 

building was of stone, very plain, and of modest size. 
In these things it was like most country churches ; but 
the interior was not so characteristic, for it had been 
recently modernized, and had an incHned floor and 
steam heat. Still, the pews were uncushioned, and 
there was no organ. Indeed, organs are almost never 
found in rustic houses of worship, and are rarities even 
in the large towns. Service was supposed to begin at 
half-past eleven, but it was customary to allow some 
leisurely minutes of grace for the benefit of the be- 
lated. Shortly before the appointed hour, the little 
bell in the kirk cupola commenced a hurried tinkHng, 
and the village ways, which hitherto had been very 
quiet and deserted, were enlivened by groups of so- 
berly dressed worshippers faring on foot toward the 
church. On arriving at the edifice it was to be 
noticed that the men were in no haste to go inside, 
but lingered at the kirk gate or around the porch 
and visited. When the time for service came, and 
the bell ceased ringing, the outside loiterers would 
come stamping in. It was no wonder that their tread 
was emphatic, for their shoes were exceedingly sturdy, 
and the soles were well studded with heavy-headed 
nails. A pair of men's " strong-wearing boots " would 
weigh six pounds, and the projecting iron pegs num- 
ber two hundred or more in each. 

The minister did not appear until the congregation, 



224 The Land of Heather 

including late comers, were all in the pews. Then the 
door at the rear of the kirk opened, and he came rust- 
ling down the aisle in his robes. In front of the pul- 
pit was an open space with a railing around it. There 
sat the members of the choir. Their leader, or " pre- 
centor," gave them the key-note when they were about 
to sing, and he beat time. Nearly every one in the 
congregation joined in the hymns, and the music was 
harmonious and pleasing, and the lack of an organ did 
not seem serious. The worshippers all had Bibles, and 
looked up the minister's texts and followed him in his 
Scripture readings with great faithfulness. There were 
two sermons, a short, simple one for the children, and 
a long one, various-headed and more or less theological, 
for the older hearers. Both discourses were vigorous 
and thoughtful, and showed the preacher to be a man 
of sense and ability. He was listened to attentively 
for the most part, about the only distractions being the 
occasional passing of snuff-boxes and the sounding 
blasts of noses that succeeded this ceremony. Not 
far from the pew 1 occupied on my first Sunday sat a 
venerable farmer, who, from time to time, took his 
snuff-box from his vest pocket and passed it to the 
elder in the seat behind, with the stealthy quiet and 
sidelong glance of a schoolboy doing something he 
ought not, on the sly. When the box returned to 
him, he indulged in a generous sniff himself, and then 



The Sabbath and the Kirks 225 

got out a great colored handkerchief; and it was a full 
minute before he had adjusted himself into his original 
watchfulness of the points of the sermon. 

I was told that this old farmer sometimes fell asleep 
and snored in church, and that of late, finding ordinary- 
methods of inducing wakefulness insufficient, he had 
come to church generously provided with sweeties, on 
which he ruminated between snufF-takings. The gos- 
sips affirmed that he made such a noise cracking away 
at the sweeties after he got them between his teeth, that 
you could have heard him all over a church three times 
as large as the Free Kirk. This was perhaps an ex- 
aggeration, for I noted nothing of the sort, nor any 
serious propensity on his part to drowsiness. He cer- 
tainly acquitted himself better than an old lady four 
seats in front of me. The service was long, and toward 
its close she nodded into a nap and lost her balance. 
There was a thump and a scrape, and then she started 
back erect. No one smiled at the episode, and it was 
apparently too common an occurrence to attract much 
attention. 

Previous to its remodelling, the Free Kirk had a 
gallery, but this had been for a long time superfluous, 
and it was torn out. Even with its reduced seating 
capacity, the kirk was far from crowded. Vacant pews 
were sadly numerous, where fifty years ago worshippers 
were so many that not only the body of the church 



226 The Land of Heather 

was full, but some had to be seated in the aisles. In 
those days the glen was much more densely populated, 
and there were many little farms and cotter's houses 
scattered along the now lonely hillsides. The big 
farms have absorbed them, and the walls of the little 
houses have gone into stone fences or new byres on 
the large holdings that are at present customary. The 
cities and the new countries beyond the seas have 
drawn many people from the glen. In 1845 thirty 
families left at one time for America. But in spite of 
the diminished size of the congregation, the parishioners 
pay their preacher ^^180 a year, and give him the use 
of the manse in which he makes his home. 

This manse, in common with most of its kind, was a 
plain, two-story stone dwelling with a garden at one 
side that overflowed every summer with vegetables, 
small fruits, and flowers. Gravelled paths led to the 
doors, and there was a bit of lawn and some shade trees 
at the front, and the whole was enclosed by hedges. 

It was the habit of the Free Kirk minister to walk 
or drive on Sunday evenings to one of the outlying 
districts of the glen, and there conduct a meeting in 
some cottage or schoolhouse. On mild summer Sab- 
baths these little gatherings were often held in the 
open air. I attended one such. It was in a little 
field back of a row of cottages. Chairs were brought 
from the houses, and boards from a neighboring joiner's 



The Sabbath and the Kirks 



227 



shop were laid from seat to seat, and twenty or thirty 
of us found places on them, while several boys sat on 
the grass by the hedge that was close behind. For 
the convenience of the preacher a white-spreaded stand 
was provided. We sang a number of times from Gos- 
pel Hymns, and the minister prayed, read from Scrip- 
ture, and preached a short, practical sermon. Two 
great beeches, their leaves rustling in the light wind, 
overspread us, and the low sun looked underneath and 
brightened their gray trunks. Could any church be 
finer than this sylvan temple of nature ? 

In what I saw of the U. P. Kirk, it was much 
like the Free, and there seemed no special reason why 
the two denominations should not unite, as I believe 
they have since throughout Scotland. But the Estab- 
hshed Kirk, or " Kirk of Scotland," has an individu- 
ahty of its own. Official recognition is given it by 
the government, and it is aided by a levy on the pro- 
prietors of the land. Yet because this tax is an indi- 
rect one, it does not provoke the discontent occasioned 
by tithes and church rates in England. To be sure, 
the landowners who pay the tax add it to the rentals, 
but as it does not appear as a separate item, its weight 
is not reahzed. 

The church of the Established sect which I recall 
most vividly was one in a well-settled country district 
that supported not only this but two or three dissent- 



22 8 The Land of Heather 

ing churches. There was a time when a good deal of 
bitterness was felt between the government church and 
the dissenting branches ; but in this particular com- 
munity the ancient animosities had apparently died 
out. I sometimes heard the Established Kirk spoken 
of as " Auld Boblin " (Old Babylon), yet this mention 
was made jokingly, and there was no sharpness in the 
epithet. 

The church building was a low, gray stone structure 
standing well back from the highway at the end of a 
narrow lane — a lane paved with loose pebbles that 
made you feel as if you were doing penance as you 
walked over them. Coarse pebbles up to the size of 
a hen's egg were a favorite material for paths through- 
out the district. They even took the place of lawns, 
as, for instance, in front of the neighboring schoolhouse, 
where quite a space was overspread with them. The 
paths and approaches to all the local churches were 
treated in the same rude way, and once or twice a year 
the bedrels (sextons) were at great pains to scratch the 
walks over and pick out every bit of grass that had 
started on them. If there was any doubt before as to 
the stern material of which the walks were made, no 
such doubt could be entertained afterward. 

Round about the old church was the little parish 
burying-ground, with its frequent headstones and sim- 
ple monuments, some of them recent and some so old 



The Sabbath and the Kirks 229 

that the markings on them were quite worn away. 
Perhaps the most impressive of them were certain ones 
marked with grewsome symbols, Hke skulls and cross- 
bones, calculated to put the observer in a properly 
serious frame of mind. Few were reserved for the 
grave of a single individual. Usually each marked 
the burial-place of a family, and whenever one of the 
household died, a fresh name was carved at the bottom 
of the list already on the stone. But in the case of 
the humble majority in the parish, the graves had 
never been marked at all, and the bedrel in his dig- 
ging often unearthed ancient bones, or struck the end 
of a coffin. 

On the pleasant summer Sunday that I attended the 
old church I was early, but the gate at the far end of 
the lane was thrown back, and the bedrel had com- 
pleted arrangements for the arrival of the worshippers. 
Just inside the gate on the right-hand side was a little 
vestry, like a porter's lodge. Across the path, on a 
rustic bench under a beech tree, sat the gnarled old 
sexton. He looked as if he was there in solemn guard 
over the contribution plate which was on a stand im- 
mediately in front of him. No collection is taken up 
during service in the Scotch churches. A plate on a 
stand does duty instead ; but as a rule this is just inside 
the entrance of the edifice, and not, as here, at the 
portals of the churchyard. Every one, male and 



230 



The Land of Heather 



female, old and young, seems to feel it a privilege or 
duty to drop a coin on the plate, and there is sure 
to be a goodly pile, though very likely mostly in 
coppers. 

I deposited my mite as I went through the Auld 
Kirk gate, and continued along the pebbles to the 
church. On looking in I decided I would prefer to 
sit in the loft (gallery), but how to get there was a 
problem. It was plain that within the church no way 
existed to gain the desired place unless one was ath- 
lete enough to climb the supporting pillars. I did 
not think that Presbyterianism would countenance 
such a performance on the part of its gallery wor- 
shippers, and I concluded to explore outside. By 
going around to the rear I found a narrow stone stair- 
way, and I made the ascent to a tiny balcony that 
clung high on the wall. A door led from the balcony 
to the interior, and I soon had installed myself in a 
seat. 

Through the middle of the room below ran a single 
aisle, on each side of which were rows of narrow pews 
with backs so high and perpendicular it made one ache 
simply to look at them. Unhappily, the seats in the 
loft were built on the same plan — a fact I realized more 
and more emphatically as time went on. Everything 
was puritanically plain — bare plaster walls, and un- 
painted pews that were brown and worm-eaten with 




An Exchange of Snuff 



The Sabbath and the Kirks 231 

age. The floor was dirty and littered, and I could 
not help fancying its acquaintance with the broom 
dated back many months. This was indeed the case, 
as I learned later. Twice a year only was the church 
swept and cleaned, and it was then near the end of one 
of the undisturbed periods. Heat was supplied by a 
rude stove that sent a long black pipe elbowing up to 
the ceiling. The stove was placed just outside the 
overhang of the loft, and it apparently smoked at 
times, for the gallery-front and the ceiling above were 
blackened with soot. 

None of the churches of the neighborhood had an 
organ, partly because it would have been difficult to 
find any one in the district who could play such an 
instrument, partly because the more old-fashioned 
people of the region thought an organ was irreligious, 
or at least that its music was not of a character suited 
for Sabbath use in a church. It was a sentiment of 
much the same sort that formerly condemned stoves, 
as smacking too much of worldly comfort. When the 
first church stove was introduced in the region, an 
elderly worshipper in one of the other churches said 
disapprovingly, " It is a great peety that their heirts 
are grown that cauld they maun hae a stove in the 
kirk." 

But a better reason for slowness in adopting artifi- 
cial means of heating was that the fireplaces in common 



232 The Land of Heather 

use in the homes were entirely inadequate for a large 
building, and it was a long time before a really practi- 
cal stove could be had. 

The rear gable of the Auld Kirk was surmounted 
by a diminutive turret in which hung a bell. From it 
a rope dangled down the ivied wall, and the sexton, in 
calling the worshippers to service, stood below on the 
grass. The bell had a tinkHng, unmusical sound, with 
about as much power in it as there is in a large hand- 
bell wielded at the beginning of school sessions or the 
close of recess by a New England district schoolmarm. 
Twelve o'clock was the service hour, and the kirk bell 
rang for several minutes preceding. Its summons was 
the signal for the visiting groups of people in the church- 
yard to come inside, and when the bell presently stopped 
its clamor, everything became very solemn and quiet. 
But there was no preacher in the high pulpit, and the 
treacherous-looking sounding-board hung over vacancy. 

The minutes dragged on, and the stiff seats grew 
steadily harder, and still no sign of a minister. Yet 
the congregation did not seem at all anxious. The 
place had very much the air of a prayer-meeting which 
is open for remarks that no one Is ready to offer. The 
people began to get sleepy, and made occasional shifts 
to find more restful positions. But at ten minutes 
past twelve the pastor came — a staid, comfortable- 
looking old gentleman in full, black robes, who 



The Sabbath and the Kirks 233 

padded in as complacently as if he was right on the 
dot. He climbed leisurely to the pulpit, got out his 
handkerchief and laid it convenient at his right hand, 
adjusted his books, and then put on his spectacles and 
gave out a psalm for us to sing. 

Behind a httle desk under the eaves of the pulpit 
sat a young man who now rose to beat time and lead 
the singing. He kept up a marked swaying of the 
body to match the music, and in his efforts to strike 
the high notes properly, ran his eyebrows up under 
his hair. The rest of the young men and women who 
made up the choir sat on the front seats round about, 
and rose with the precentor. But the main body of 
the congregation only stood during the prayers. It 
was a rehef to get up ; yet the prayers were so long 
this was a doubtful blessing after all, and most of the 
worshippers sought some bodily support a good while 
before the end of the petitions. 

The sermon lasted a full half-hour. Its subject was 
" The Joys of Christ," and the preacher went through 
a Hst of firstlies and secondlies up to about tenthlies. 
He had a slow, droning voice, and the effort to keep 
awake in those hard, straight-backed seats was painful. 
When the possibilities of the more ordinary changes 
of position had been exhausted, the worshippers would 
lean on the pew-backs in front of them or would bow 
themselves forward with their elbows on their knees. 



234 The Land of Heather 

Some of the men gripped their heads between their 
hands in a manner that suggested they were suffering 
severely, and a few actually slept. There were female 
nodders, too, and one young woman in the manse 
pew was several times on the point of falling over 
altogether. She had continually to open her eyes with 
a decided effort and look severely at the minister to 
keep from disgracing herself. 

We were a very forlorn congregation, when at 
twenty-five minutes of two, the minister finished his 
elucidation of the tenth of Christ's joys, and we were 
released. The crowd filed out into the sunshine, and 
straggled along the lane and roadway toward the vil- 
lage. Every one was on foot. Even from a distance 
of three or four miles the people walked, whole fami- 
lies together. Some of them were old ladies, with 
their outer skirts caught up over their arms, stepping 
along as vigorously as if they were in their teens in- 
stead of past threescore. 

The adherents of " Auld Boblin " were not as 
devoted to their faith as the worshippers at the other 
local churches, and though their numbers were de- 
cidedly greater, and in spite of their government in- 
come, they fell distinctly behind the dissenters in the 
support they gave their kirk and minister. The min- 
ister himself had not the character of the other pastors. 
His lacks were moral, not intellectual, for he was by 



The Sabbath and the Kirks 235 

no means a dull or ignorant man. Some very ill stories 
were told of him, and it was well known that both he 
and his wife drank at times a good deal beyond mod- 
eration, even if their red-faced heaviness had not con- 
fessed the fact. 

But clerical tippling is not regarded as so detrimen- 
tal to a pastor's influence and efficiency in Scotland as 
it would be in America. The clergy of the dissenting 
kirks, however, are now nearly all total abstainers. 
The opposite is true of their fellows of the Estab- 
lished Kirk, and though the temperance sentiment is 
undoubtedly growing among them, there are those who 
are far from being a credit to their calling. I was 
told by one Scotch minister that not many years ago, 
in his boyhood home near Oban, they had an elderly 
clergyman who used to get drunk every time he went 
making parish calls. At each home whiskey was set 
forth for him, after the time-honored custom of the 
region, and this was so much to his liking, and the 
potations he drank were so liberal, that by the time he 
had made a half dozen visits it was necessary for some 
one to carry him back to the manse. The drink 
habit grew on him, and at length he would appear 
intoxicated in the pulpit, and be so maudlin the church 
elders would be obliged to interrupt him and take him 
out of the kirk by force. In the end the Presbytery 
induced him to resign. His habits, however, were less 



236 



The Land of Heather 



of a scandal than they might have been in that particu- 
lar community, had not his two predecessors died of 
delirium tremens. No doubt this is an extreme case, 
but that such a thing is possible is suggestive of con- 
ditions that are a little surprising to say the least. 




i!^^iiiiiiSS»^ 









A Church in a Northern Glen 



XIII 



A BURNS PILGRIMAGE 



ROBERT 
BURNS 
was born 
January 25, 1759, 
in a cabin on the 
outskirts of the 
city of Ayr ; and 
for this reason Ayr 
draws to itself 
every year hosts of 
visitors. These vis- 
itors, it is said, num- 
ber fully twice as 
many as go to Strat- 
ford, which seems 
to argue that Burns has won more hearts than Shake- 
speare has won intellects. 

You find yourself in a Burns atmosphere the mo- 
ment you reach the town ; for just outside the station 
stands an imposing monument to the poet, and the 

^31 




A Mess for the Pigs 



238 The Land of Heather 

shops are full of Burns photographs and mementos, 
and nearly all the inns and drinking-places, if not ac- 
tually named either after him or after the most famous 
character he created — Tam o' Shanter, — ^are in some 
other way reminiscent of him. One dingy little inn, 
that has a Tam o* Shanter sign hung over its portals, 
claims to be the veritable place where Tam, on that 
fateful winter night 

** was glorious. 
O'er a' the ills o' life victorious.'* 

It even preserves the wooden mug out of which Tam 
drank, and the oak chair in which he was wont to 
sit. 

Not less interesting are " The Twa Brigs o' Ayr," 
to which Burns gave such an entertaining individuality 
in the poem of that name. When he wrote of them and 
immortalized their spirited comments on each other's 
failings, the new brig was just nearing completion. 
Puffed up with pride it scoffingly asks its rival — 

** Will you, poor, narrow footpath of a street. 

Where twa wheelbarrows tremble when they meet. 
Your ruined, formless bulk o' stane an' lime. 
Compare wi' bonnie brigs o' modern time ? " 

But the auld brig declares — 

** I'll be a brig when ye' re a shapeless cairn! 
As yet ye little ken about the matter. 
But twa- three winters will inform you better." 



A Burns Pilgrimage 239 

Sure enough, the new bridge weakened, and has been 
replaced, while the old bridge stands as of yore. 

The poet's father, at the time of his famous son's 
birth, was employed as a gardener by a gentleman of 
small estate in the neighborhood, and two miles out of 
the town is the low cottage with whitewashed walls and 
thatched roof, which was his home. It has a pleasant 
flavor of unaltered antiquity as seen from without, 
though this effect is somewhat counteracted by the 
many buses, coaches, and lesser vehicles that stand 
along the roadside, or that are constantly coming and 
going. Until within a few years the house has been 
an inn ; but now it is public property, kept as a 
memorial, and the entrance is guarded by a turn- 
stile, through which you purchase the privilege to 
pass by payment of twopence. 

The kitchen is the only room of special interest. 
It was in this room that Burns first saw the light, 
and tradition adds that the poet was only a few days 
old when a violent storm " tirled " away part of the 
roof, and mother and babe were forced to seek shelter 
in the cottage of a neighbor. The apartment is still 
kept in some semblance of its original state, and con- 
tains the old curtained bed in a niche of the wall, a 
quaint, whitewashed fireplace, a dresser full of blue 
crockery, a tall clock, and two ancient tables notched 
all over with knife-cut initials. Yet, after all, the 



240 The Land of Heather 

kitchen lacks the touch of Hfe ; it is not used, and it 
has the stiffness inseparable from a show room. 

A short walk beyond the Burns cottage stands the 
renowned Alloway Kirk, in which Tam o' Shanter saw 
the witches. It has long been a ruin, and the last of 
the roof fell in three-quarters of a century ago. Even 
in Burns's time it had been abandoned, and was going 
to decay. But the walls continue intact, and are braced 
by numerous iron rods that will keep what is left of the 
structure erect for many years to come. A little bell 
still hangs in the stone arch of the belfry, and a bit 
of chain attached to it dangles down the front wall. 
Wandering among the churchyard graves at the time 
I visited the ancient kirk was a gray, bent old man. 
He was very thin, and his faded coat hung loosely 
on his sloping shoulders. Astride his beaked nose 
he wore a large pair of antiquated spectacles that gave 
him a look of owlish wisdom. He seemed to make 
it his business to hobble about and act as a guide to 
all visitors. Some paid no attention to him, while 
others found him very entertaining and instructive. 
He never varied his tones, and he used the same 
showman's words and manner with every party. At 
frequent intervals, in the midst of his information, he 
would break forth into poetry. He pointed out the 
stone that marked the graves of Burns's father, and 
" Agnes Brown, his spouse," and led his auditors to 



"^ 



A Burns Pilgrimage 241 

the resting-place of " Souter Johnny/' He showed 
in which direction lay the old road by which Tarn 
came from Ayr, indicated the window of the church 
whose midnight glow arrested Tam*s attention, and 
through which Tam watched the scene within ; and he 
told which the other window was where the de'il sat 
fiddling for the witches' dancing. At this point the old 
man would drop his prose and recite the final verses 
of the poem with great energy, emphasized by many 
gestures of hand and cane. His singsong and his 
Scotch tang gave the poem new flavor and attraction, 
and I loitered until I had heard the recital several 
times repeated. 

Alloway Kirk is only a short distance from the 
"banks and braes o' bonnie Doon." The Doon is 
an unusually pretty little river that flows swift and 
clear between steep, wooded banks. The auld brig 
across which Tam o' Shanter made his wild flight 
is the centre of interest. It has a high, handsome 
arch, and over this the road climbs as if it had en- 
countered a Httle hill. The highway of the present 
time preserves a commonplace level across a new 
bridge a few rods below, and the auld brig is not 
much used, save by lovers of Burns and by an elderly 
man who stations himself at the top of the arch, and, 
like his fellow laborer in the kirkyard, spouts " Tam 
o' Shanter" to all comers. 



242 The Land of Heather 

Burns was still a child when his residence in this 
immediate vicinity terminated ; for he was only seven 
when his father took a small farm on his employer's 
estate. The change proved to be an unfortunate one, 
his savings melted away, and presently the family 
moved ten miles farther into the country and settled 
on a second farm at Tarbolton. Here the father died, 
and as Burns was the eldest of the seven children, the 
responsibility of managing the farm fell on his shoul- 
ders. He did not make it pay, and his troubles mul- 
tiplied. 

Meanwhile he had produced a considerable amount 
of verse, and at length he tried the experiment of put- 
ting it into book form. The edition was printed at 
his own expense, and consisted of only six hundred 
copies. Yet these were quickly sold, and left him 
twenty pounds profit. What was of more impor- 
tance, it won him friends in the literary world, who 
encouraged him to seek a publisher in Edinburgh. 
This he did successfully, and the demand for his 
poems in the following year made him master of 
about five hundred pounds. Now he felt himself to 
be independent, and he loaned a part of his wealth 
to his brother Gilbert, and with the rest took a farm 
near Dumfries, resolved to settle himself permanently 
in the occupation of agriculture. On this farm, with 
his wife and children, he spent what were perhaps the 




The Brig o' Doon 



A Burns Pilgrimage 243 

happiest and most tranquil days of his life. Unfortu- 
nately these were not destined to last. In the course 
of a few years he had exhausted his resources. The 
soil yielded poetry, but not, in his case, a living, and 
thenceforth he made his home in Dumfries. There 
he found employment in the service of the govern- 
ment as an exciseman at a salary of seventy pounds a 
year, and this meagre income necessitated the utmost 
economy. 

As compared with Ayr, which is unusually clean 
and tidy for a Scotch town, Dumfries is dirty an.d 
crowded. One feels that it is not nearly so much in 
harmony with the poet as the quiet pastoral region 
about his birthplace, with its fine trees and level fields. 
The house in which Burns lived when he moved from 
the farm is a plain three-story tenement near the river, 
with other houses elbowing it on either side. A single 
upper floor, consisting of a little kitchen and two other 
rooms, was all he occupied. At the end of eighteen 
months he took another house, and as he had the 
whole of it, was perhaps more comfortable than in the 
tenement by the river. Yet it was very small, and 
whoever seeks it now finds it in a shabby neighbor- 
hood, overlooked by big, odorous tanneries. In this 
house Burns dwelt his last three years, and it was here 
he died. His poverty at the time was extreme, but 
he was not in debt. 



244 The Land of Heather 

Just around the corner, only a few steps from the 
Httle white cottage among the tanneries, is a great 
brown church. It is very ancient, and the churchyard 
is crowded full of heavy gravestones, monuments, and 
tombs — twenty-six thousand of them — and they stand 
thicker than they would in a marble yard. There was 
a grim suggestion, in their close-set rows and regular 
placing, of a veritable city of the dead from whose tree- 
less barren — sunburned, storm-swept, and blasted — 
all cheer had flown away. At the far end of this forlorn 
and stony enclosure the poet lies buried, and over his 
remains has been erected an ugly mausoleum that is 
quite in keeping with the surroundings, but wholly 
foreign to the individuality of Burns himself. 

The poet's celebrity during his later years made 
him an object of interest and curiosity to strangers, 
and many persons passing through Dumfries would 
call on him. He could not conveniently receive them 
at his home, and was accustomed instead to go to the 
town inns, where the interviews often terminated in 
convivial excesses. To the taverns he also was in the 
habit of going with companions who lived in the town 
itself; and wherever he was, the evening was sure to 
be a merry one, for his good humor and ready wit 
were unfaiHng. 

A favorite resort was the Globe Hotel, on a tiny 
lane just off the square. Here you can see the dark 



A Burns Pilgrimage 



245 



wainscotted taproom where Burns used to sing, tell 
stories, and drink. His table is still there, and in a 
corner is the chair to which he was partial, while, if 
you will step upstairs, you can see his punch bowl, 
Jean's workbox, and a verse of " Comin' through the 
Rye,'' just as it was scratched by the poet himself on a 
window-pane. It is a privilege to look on these things, 
for every relic of Burns and every spot associated with 
him has something of sacredness ; and to Ayr and Dum- 
fries come pilgrims from the world over to observe for 
themselves the scenes familiar to his eyes and celebrated 
in his verse. 



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XIV 



A GLIMPSE OF GALLOWAY 




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HAT I saw 

of Galloway 
was mostly 
confined to its far end, 
where I spent some 
days in the little sea- 
port town of Stranraer 
and its neighborhood. 
The attraction that 
drew me thither was 
in part a certain charm 
that literature has 
given to Galloway, but 
more a desire to see 
that portion of the district known as " The Rhinns." 
There was a mystic spell in this name which held sug- 
gestions of strange and highly picturesque landscape, 
and of native dwellers whose ways would be peculiarly 
primitive and interesting. But, after all, " Rhinns '* Is 
simply equivalent to the English word prongs, and a 

246 



A Stone-breaker 



A Glimpse of Cjalloway 247 

glance at the map reveals its significance, for the land 
projects seaward to north and south like the clumsy- 
horns of some great beast. 

These Rhinns of Galloway are also called the Gallo- 
way Highlands, a name which for a stranger has a 
more definite meaning than the other, even if decid- 
edly less fascinating. The scenery, however, is but a 
dwarfed imitation of the Scotch Highlands of the 
north, and is only worthy the title when comparison 
is made with the general low flatness of the rest of the 
Galloway country. The upheaval is never really lofty, 
rugged, or in any way striking, and indeed attains to 
nothing more than big, rounded swells. The grass- 
fields, pastures, ploughed lands, and the patches of 
woodland sweep away gently over the hilltops and 
down into the valleys, and, with the farmhouses, give 
the region an aspect of pleasant fertility. 

On a long tramp over the Rhinns, that occupied 
nearly the whole of a summer day, I learned that the 
farmers were far from satisfied, in spite of the seem- 
ingly prosperous cultivation of the country. They 
complained because prices were low, and because a cer- 
tain ogre of a landlord dealt hardly with them, and 
stripped their holdings of the best cattle to satisfy his 
claims. 

" I kenned' him," said one man, " when he hadna 
ane ha*penny to rub against anither. But he hae 



24<> 1 he Land of Heather 

plenty noo. Hoo he gat his wealth I canna say, 
though 'tis tell't 'twas through a brither who robbed 
a bank in America. This brither was caught and pit 
in prison, but he had secretit the money, and when he 
was lat oot, he gat it and cam' hame, and he took to 
drink, and ane day jumped oot a twa-story window 
and was killed. Aifter that, the mon that's the land- 
lord noo seemed to be sudden rich, and since then he 
hae bought a' the farmlands that coom in the market. 
But I'm no thinkin' his brither, gin he stole as they 
say, wad hae been lat loose if he hadna gi'en up the 
treasure he'd ta'en. The Yankees are too clever for 
that, are they not, noo ? " 

I had not the assurance he showed as to the cute- 
ness of my countrymen in such matters, and had to 
confess that some of our rascals have a good deal easier 
time than they deserve, and that we were in the habit 
of dealing less severely with the gentlemanly law- 
breaker who, while in the employ of a bank, takes 
tens or hundreds of thousands, than with the petty 
thief whose methods are more vulgar, and whose steal- 
ings may amount to only a few dollars. 

The farmer whose remarks I have reported had 
fallen in with me on the road, and we had been trudg- 
ing along in company, but now we came to the lane 
which turned aside to his home, and we parted. A 
little farther on I overtook half a dozen children play- 




The Postman 



A Glimpse of Galloway 249 

ing horse. They had twigs for whips, and gay-colored 
worsted reins which they said they had knit themselves. 
We got acquainted and kept on together for a mile or 
two. Sometimes they ran, sometimes walked, and 
sometimes stopped to make forays into the neighbor- 
ing hedges or woodlands. They gathered flowers, and 
they watched the birds, and whenever a songster flew 
up from the clumps of furze and hawthorn growing on 
the roadside banks, they hastened to see if they could 
find a nest. Once they called me to them, and reach- 
ing into a cranny among the leaves and brambles of 
the hedgerow, took out an egg and a naked little 
bird for my delectation. I begged them to restore 
these treasures, and asked how they happened to find 
them. But they said, " Oh, we kenned that nest 
before." 

I had noticed that the fields seemed very vacant, 
and I mentioned this to the children. They, however, 
declared it was not so always, and I should wait till 
harvest. Then all the Irish came over from their 
home country to help, and the farmlands were nearly 
as busy as the town. 

" Are you all Scotch ? " I queried. 

"Ay, we are, sir ! '* they responded. 

"And do you not wish you were Irish ? " 

" No ! " said they, with emphasis, " we would die 
firrust ! " 



250 The Land of Heather 

I suppose they had no idea how close was their 
racial relationship. 

For many miles after leaving Stranraer I was on a 
road that kept along the heights, but at length I 
descended by a side way to the sea, and followed the 
windings of the shore northerly. At one point I sat 
down and rested while I chatted with a white-haired 
laborer breaking stone by the roadside. Again, I 
paused to speak with a boy who lay in the grass on 
the open, seaward side of the highway watching a 
group of cows pasturing on the patches of unfenced 
grassland next the pebbly beach. He said he brought 
the cows there daily from the farm three miles distant. 

The afternoon was waning when I finally began to 
retrace my steps. Earlier, the sky had been clouded 
and threatening, but as I rambled back to the town 
the sun came out pleasantly warm, the haze in the air 
cleared, and I could see the green, hedgerowed hills 
beyond the bay. 

On another day I went by train across the Rhinns to 
Port Patrick. From there the Irish coast is only a 
score of miles distant, and Port Patrick used to be 
the landing point for vessels from Larne and Belfast. 
Half a million pounds were at one time expended on 
the harbor, but the situation is too exposed, and the bil- 
lows wrecked the great walls of masonry and tore apart 
the huge blocks of stone, even though they were bolted 



A Glimpse of Galloway 251 

together with stout sinews of iron. At the same time 
the waves heaved many big boulders into the harbor 
entrance that shut out all but the smaller craft, and 
now you find the ruined masonry abandoned to the 
will of the sea. 

The place itself is a sleepy little village in a ravine 
that opens back inland between two steep slopes. It 
was named after Ireland's patron saint, who here first 
set foot on Scottish soil. Tradition relates that he 
came, not as ordinary mortals would, in a boat, but 
skipped over the twenty miles of water at a single 
jump. The marks of his feet where he landed were 
formerly plainly imprinted in a rock on the borders of 
the harbor, but this rock was broken up when that 
futile and expensive attempt was made to improve the 
port. St. Patrick did not find the people as hospitably 
inclined toward him as the Irish. Indeed, some of the 
Galloway men were rude enough to cut off the visiting 
saint's head. This treatment so offended him that he 
determined to leave Scotland, and he took his head in 
his teeth and swam across to his beloved Ireland. 

Quite likely the details of his return to Erin may 
be mythical. Certainly no one at present residing in 
the port claims to have witnessed the exploit, in spite 
of the fact that the inhabitants of the region live to a 
very great age. One of the stories illustrative of Gal- 
loway longevity is this : — 



252 The Land of Heather 

" A stranger found a man of over threescore years 
and ten weeping by the roadside. He inquired the 
cause of this lamentation, and the old man said his 
father had just chastised him for throwing stones at 
his grandfather." 

After an hour or two by the shore, I followed a road 
up the hollow and on through a wood where the ground 
was sprinkled everywhere with bluebell clusters. Be- 
yond the wood lay open hilltops, over which I went 
northward up and down the gloomy slopes for a long 
distance. It was a "coorse" day, as the Scotch say 
— the sky overcast with sullen clouds, and a chilly 
wind blowing. There was almost no protection on the 
uplands, for they were nearly bare of trees, and even 
hedgerows were infrequent. The crests of the hills 
were often wide wastes of heather and thorny whins, 
but lower lay broad farm fields. The cottages and 
farmhouses were far apart, and they so rarely had the 
softening touch of trees or shrubbery near them that 
they made the region look doubly lonely and desolate. 

Most of the time I had no company save that of 
the curlews and peesweeps, with their wild squeaks and 
screams, and I was heartily glad presently to meet a 
postman coming out from a farmyard gate. He was 
going in my direction, and I accelerated my speed to 
keep pace with him. A canvas bag containing the 
mail hung at his side, and he carried a rubber cape on 



A Glimpse of Galloway 253 

his arm ready for use in case it rained. He had a long 
daily circuit to make, and said he walked a hundred miles 
a week. When we parted he went off by a path over 
the moorlands, and a little later I turned back toward 
Port Patrick, where I took the train for Stranraer. 

I stayed while in Stranraer at an unusually pleasant 
and homelike temperance hotel. Mrs. Bruce, the good 
old lady who kept the house, was very kind and moth- 
erly, and I liked nothing better of an evening than to 
sit and talk with her in her clean little kitchen. She 
did not have a very high opinion of Stranraer. In 
fact, she did not hesitate to say that she believed it was 
the most drunken place in Scotland. The police court 
had no end of cases of intoxication to deal with, espe- 
cially on Monday mornings, when the tipplers had to 
answer for their Saturday night carousing. Worst of 
all, the provost (mayor) himself was a man who was 
boozing most of the time, and not infrequently had to 
be locked in his room while the liquor craze was on. 
Stranraer was a resort for all sorts of people, and in 
summer they came in crowds. Mostly they were Irish, 
arriving from their native isle by the steamship line 
which makes this its haven, or they were Scotch town- 
folk down from Ayr and Glasgow on a holiday. Mrs. 
Bruce liked the Irish best. They were sure to be 
pleasant-spoken and courteous, while the Scotch were 
at times rude and troublesome. 



254 The Land of Heather 

My landlady formerly lived several miles from the 
town, out in the country, and there she for a long 
period lodged the ministers of the local church. She 
had a succession of six in her home, all young and all 
good enough in their way ; but near acquaintance and 
knowledge of them had made it impossible for her to 
feel the veneration toward the cloth which she had 
been brought up to think was its due. Her previous 
intuitions were that a minister had something of the 
divine about him, and that there was a gulf fixed 
between him and ordinary folk. But of these six 
young men only one was at all consecrated to his 
work. With the others it was just a trade. They 
preached for a living, and she was afraid that was the 
case with nearly all ministers. She thought, too, that 
many of them did not thoroughly believe, or, at least, 
had little care one way or the other, about the doctrine 
which they preached. These six ministers who had 
been in her home were simply fun-loving young men, 
very human in their likes and dislikes, their faults and 
foibles ; and, except for one, if they had happened to 
take up some other calHng, it would have been all the 
same to them. 

I was not a little regretful when the time came to 
leave my Stranraer hotel, yet the pleasantest memory 
is of the parting. I had a long railroad journey before 
me, and at the last moment it occurred to the landlady 




Woodland Hyacinths 



A Glimpse of Galloway 255 

and her daughter that I ought to take along a lunch. 
This they hastened to put up, and they would take 
no pay, but bestowed it on me and saw me started 
away with as much apparent solicitude as if I had 
been a near relative. 

My last sight of the land of heather was from a 
little place called Gilsland, eighteen miles east of Car- 
lisle. From the Gilsland railway station I tramped off 
over the hills in search of a portion of the old Roman 
wall said to be in existence there — the wall that was 
built across the north of England to keep out the 
Scots and Picts. I found what I sought on a grazing 
upland where the peaceful sheep were feeding, as if 
the scene had always been pastorally quiet and its 
ancient martial aspect a fable. But the appearance of 
Scotland was everywhere different in the days of the 
Romans. There was little cultivated land and smooth 
pasturage. On the hills were vast forests of giant 
oaks, and the swampy valleys were overgrown with 
thickets of birch, alder, and hazel. Deer, wolves, and 
wild cats abounded. It was a difficult country to con- 
quer, and the Roman troops were incessantly engaged 
in warfare with the wild northern tribes. Nor did 
they ever succeed in permanently subduing them, and 
when they withdrew after occupying Britain for three 
and one half centuries, the people of the north were 
unchanged in either language or habits. 



256 The Land of Heather 

A wall, to serve as a line of defence against the 
marauding Scotch, was begun about the year 120 by 
the emperor Hadrian. At first it was only an embank- 
ment of earth. When finished it stretched across the 
country for seventy miles, from the sea near Newcastle 
on the east, to the Solway Firth on the west. Soon 
after its completion the Roman frontier was pushed 
onward some fifty or more miles, and another wall was 
built, from the Firth of Forth at Edinburgh to the 
Clyde at Dumbarton. This marked the extreme north- 
ern limit of the empire. The strip between the two 
walls included most of the Scotch Lowlands; but it did 
not long remain in undisputed Roman possession, and 
presently the southern wall was again the defensive 
border line. When Severus came to Britain, he re- 
placed the earth rampart with a wall of stone eight 
feet thick and twelve feet high. Along its course he 
established eighteen military stations garrisoned by 
cohorts of Roman soldiers, and at intervals of a 
mile were forts containing one hundred men each, 
while between each pair of forts were four watch- 
towers. Toward the close of the fourth century Ro- 
man dominion was reasserted over the Scotch lowlands, 
but the territory was shortly lost again, and a little 
later the Romans finally abandoned Britain. 

Of the huge line of fortifications erected by the old 
Roman emperors surprisingly little remains, and even 



A Glimpse of Galloway 257 

when the remnants are best preserved, as at Gilsland, 
they are not at all conspicuous. Here had been one 
of the old forts, and I had expected to see some mas- 
sive ruins ; but the reality was hardly more than an 
ordinary stone fence, and it was rarely so high that I 
could not overlook it. Beyond a narrow area on this 
hilltop the old-time upheavals of earth and stone 
ceased altogether, and the fragments to be found any- 
where from coast to coast are few and insignificant. 
But, though to the eye the ruins were not at all im- 
posing, when I recalled their age and associations, to 
have seen them seemed a notable experience. They 
furnished, too, an impressive example of time's power 
to level and disintegrate, and of the constant efforts of 
the elements to wipe out everything that lifts itself 
above the general level, though man, too, in this 
instance, has had much to do with the devastation. 
Now I took leave of bonnie Scotland and journeyed 
southward into England, a section more beautiful, per- 
haps, to the eye, but certainly not one which appeals 
more forcibly to the imagination. I doubt if any land 
has the fortune to be as widely loved by those not 
native to its soil as this country of the heather. Its 
glens and hills, its woods and shrubby dens, its bracken 
slopes and moorland heights, its noisy streams and 
its mountain-girded lochs have won the affection of 
the whole English-speaking race. Then there is its 



258 



The Land of Heather 



past, its days of heroism and romance, that live for us 
in history and song, and, more than all, in the magic 
pages of Sir Walter Scott. Finally, Scotland is thj 
home of one of the most hardy, thrifty, brave, and 
warm-hearted races in the world. 




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